TitleLightweight and modular resource leak verification
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2021
AuthorsKellogg M, Shadab N, Sridharan M, Ernst MD
Conference NameESEC/FSE 2021: The ACM 29th joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE)
Pagination181–192
Date or Month PublishedAugust
Conference LocationAthens, Greece
AbstractA resource leak occurs when a program allocates a resource, such as a socket or file handle, but fails to deallocate it. Resource leaks cause resource starvation, slowdowns, and crashes. Previous techniques to prevent resource leaks are either unsound, imprecise, inapplicable to existing code, slow, or a combination of these. \par Static detection of resource leaks requires checking that de-allocation methods are always invoked on relevant objects before they become unreachable. Our key insight is that leak detection can be reduced to an accumulation problem, a class of typestate problems amenable to sound and modular checking without the need for a heavyweight, whole-program alias analysis. The precision of an accumulation analysis can be improved by computing targeted aliasing information, and we augmented our baseline checker with three such novel techniques: a lightweight ownership transfer system; a specialized resource alias analysis; and a system to create a fresh obligation when a non-final resource field is updated. \par Our approach occupies a unique slice of the design space: it is sound and runs relatively quickly (taking minutes on programs that a state-of-the-art approach took hours to analyze). We implemented our techniques for Java in an open-source tool called the Resource Leak Checker. The Resource Leak Checker revealed 49 real resource leaks in widely-deployed software. It scales well, has a manageable false positive rate (comparable to the high-confidence resource leak analysis built into the Eclipse IDE), and imposes only a small annotation burden (1/1500 LoC) for developers.
Downloadshttps://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1MBBVh0wbaQnlxKwsPwMPEFVIMaH2tj6N... slides (Google Slides) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY5K3kRg3aw talk video (YouTube) https://checkerframework.org/ implementation https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4902321 scripts and data
Citation KeyKelloggSSE2021