Title
Runtime checking C programs
Abstract
The C Programming Language is known for being an efficient language that can be compiled on almost any architecture and operating system. However the absence of dynamic safety checks and a relatively weak type system allows programmer oversights that are hard to spot. In this paper, we present RTC, a runtime monitoring tool that instruments unsafe code and monitors the program execution. RTC is built on top of the ROSE compiler infrastructure. RTC finds memory bugs and arithmetic overflows and underflows, and run-time type violations. Most of the instrumentations are directly added to the source file and only require a minimal runtime system. As a result, the instrumented code remains portable. In tests against known error detection benchmarks, RTC found 98% of all memory related bugs and had zero false positives. In performance tests conducted with well known algorithms, such as binary search and MD5, we determined that the unoptimized overhead rate is between a factor of 1.8 and a factor of 77 respectively.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1145/2695664.2695906
SAC 2015: Symposium on Applied Computing Salamanca Spain April, 2015
Field
DocType
ISBN
Programmer,Computer science,Source code,Error detection and correction,Compiler,Thread (computing),Binary search algorithm,MD5,Operating system,Runtime system
Conference
978-1-4503-3196-8
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.34
13
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Reed Milewicz182.47
Rajeshwar Vanka291.15
James Tuck356433.06
Daniel J. Quinlan465280.13
Peter Pirkelbauer5529.37