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Cross-checking Semantic Correctness: the Case of Finding File System Bugs by Changwoo Min; Sanidhya Kashyap; Byoungyoung Lee; Chengyu Song; Taesoo Kim is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

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Today, systems software is too complex to be bug-free. To find bugs in systems software, developers often rely on code checkers, like Linux's Sparse. However, the capability of existing tools used in commodity, large-scale systems is limited to finding only shallow bugs that tend to be introduced by simple programmer mistakes, and so do not require a deep understanding of code to find them. Unfortunately, the majority of bugs as well as those that are difficult to find are semantic ones, which violate high-level rules or invariants (e.g., missing a permission check). Thus, it is difficult for code checkers lacking the understanding of a programmer's true intention to reason about semantic correctness. To solve this problem, we present JUXTA, a tool that automatically infers high-level semantics directly from source code. The key idea in JUXTA is to compare and contrast multiple existing implementations that obey latent yet implicit high-level semantics. For example, the implementation of open() at the file system layer expects to handle an outof-space error from the disk in all file systems. We applied JUXTA to 54 file systems in the stock Linux kernel (680K LoC), found 118 previou

Author

Changwoo Min; Sanidhya Kashyap; Byoungyoung Lee; Chengyu Song; Taesoo Kim

Publisher

ACM

Published

2015

Language

EN