Context- and path-sensitive memory leak detection

We present a context- and path-sensitive algorithm for detecting memory leaks in programs with explicit memory management. Our leak detection algorithm is based on an underlying escape analysis: any allocated location in a procedure P that is not deallocated in P and does not escape from P is leaked. We achieve very precise context- and pathsensitivity by expressing our analysis using boolean constraints. In experiments with six large open source projects our analysis produced 510 warnings of which 455 were unique memory leaks, a false positive rate of only 10.8%. A parallel implementation improves performance by over an order of magnitude on large projects; over five million lines of code in the Linux kernel is analyzed in 50 minutes. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.4 [Software Engineering]: Software/Program Verification; D.2.3 [Software Engineering]: Coding Tools and Techniques; D.2.5 [Software Engineering]: Testing and Debugging General Terms Algorithms, Experimentation, Lan...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: SIGSOFT
• Authors: Yichen Xie, Alexander Aiken
• Keywords: Explicit Memory Management, Leak Detection Algorithm, Memory Leaks, SIGSOFT 2005, Software Engineering