Detecting Element Accessing Bugs in C++ Sequence Containers

Zhilin Li, Xutong Ma, Mengze Hu, Jun Yan

Abstract

Sequence Containers (SC) in the C++ Standard Template Library (STL), such as the vector, are widely used in large-scale projects for their maintainability and flexibility. However, accessing the elements in an SC is bug-prone, as such operations will not check their boundaries during compilation or execution, which can lead to memory errors, such as buffer overflow problems. And these bugs are difficult to detect with available static analyzers, since the size of SCs and the target of iterators cannot be precisely tracked without accurate analysis of the behavior of SCs and iterators.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{Li-al:ASE24,
  author    = {Zhilin Li and
               Xutong Ma and
               Mengze Hu and
               Jun Yan},
  title     = {Detecting Element Accessing Bugs in C++ Sequence Containers},
  booktitle = {ASE},
  pages     = {883--894},
  publisher = {{ACM}},
  year      = {2024},
}

Detecting Element Accessing Bugs in C++ Sequence Containers

Abstract

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