Effective Generation of Interface Robustness Properties for Static Analysis

A software system interacts with its environment through system interfaces. Robustness of software systems are governed by various temporal properties related to these interfaces, whose violation leads to system crashes and security compromises. These properties can be formally specified for system interfaces and statically verified against a software system. But manually specifying a large number of interface properties for static verification is often inaccurate or incomplete, apart from being cumbersome. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that effectively generates interface properties for static checking from a few generic, high level robustness rules that capture interface behavior. We implement our framework for an existing static analyzer with simple data flow extensions and apply it on POSIX-API system interfaces used in 10 Redhat-9.0 open source packages. The results show that the framework can effectively generate a large number of useful interface properties fr...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: KBSE
• Authors: Mithun Acharya, Tanu Sharma, Jun Xu, Tao Xie
• Keywords: Interface Properties, KBSE 2006, Software Engineering, Software System, Various Temporal Properties