College of Computer and Communication Engineering, China University of Petroleum, Qingdao, China

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Abstract—On account of the complexity of programs, it is difficult to identify all detecting objects of null dereference, which is one of the preconditions of null dereference detection. This paper introduces an approach for identifying all detecting objects of null dereference of C programs. First, based on the relationship of dereference expressions with nodes of abstract syntax tree (AST), we identify referenced pointers; then based on the abstract storage described by region-based three value logic (RSTVL) and function summary, we identify detecting objects of null dereference. In order to validate the adequacy of our approach, five realworld projects are utilized for experimental analysis, and the results show that our approach could identify all detecting objects of null dereference.

Index Terms—null pointer dereference, defect detection, addressable expression, function summary

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Cite: Yukun Dong, "An Approach for Identifying Detecting Objects of Null Dereference," Journal of Software vol. 9, no. 11, pp. 2771-2777, 2014.