Lightweight runtime checking of C programs with RTC

Milewicz, Reed; Vanka, Rajesh; Tuck, James; Quinlan, Daniel; Pirkelbauer, Peter

doi:10.1016/j.cl.2016.01.001

Title: Lightweight runtime checking of C programs with RTC

Journal Article · Fri Jan 15 00:00:00 EST 2016 · Computer Languages, Systems & Structures

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cl.2016.01.001· OSTI ID:1477830

Milewicz, Reed ^[1]; Vanka, Rajesh ^[2];

^[3]; Quinlan, Daniel ^[4]; Pirkelbauer, Peter ^[1]

Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL (United States)
Matlab (United States)
North Carolina State Univ., Raleigh, NC (United States)
Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)

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. Finally, in performance tests conducted with well known algorithms, such as binary search and MD5, we determined that our tool has an average run-time overhead rate of 9.7× and memory overhead rate of 3.5×.

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Research Organization:: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)

Sponsoring Organization:: USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)

Grant/Contract Number:: AC52-07NA27344

OSTI ID:: 1477830

Report Number(s):: LLNL-JRNL-748157; 933309

Journal Information:: Computer Languages, Systems & Structures, Vol. 45, Issue C; ISSN 1477-8424

Publisher:: ElsevierCopyright Statement

Country of Publication:: United States

Language:: English

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Cited by: 3 works

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