A new approach to detecting memory access errors in C programs

Memory access errors such as out-of-bounds, pointer abuses, and illegal freeing are one of the principal reasons for failures of C programs. As a result, a number of research works have focused on the problem of dynamic detection of memory access errors in C programs. However, existing approaches have one or more of the following problems: inability to detect all memory errors, changing the memory allocation mechanism, incompatibility with libraries, and excessive performance overheads. In this paper, we suggest a new approach to cope with these problems. The primary goal of our approach is to present an effective technique with high precision, better performance, and the relatively low space overheads. Our approach combines source code transformation to improve accuracy and the efficient data structures (i.e., bitmap scheme) to obtain better performance.