Towards Patching Memory Leak Bugs in Off-The-Shelf Software

Abstract—Static and dynamic analysis techniques for bug detection have significantly improved in the last decades, and are today implemented in industry-strength tools and routinely applied by developers. Nevertheless, it is still difficult to deal with bugs located in OTS software, since developers lack the source code and/or knowledge about their internals to fix these bugs. In this paper, we propose an approach for fixing memory leak bugs in OTS software, that leverages dynamic binary analysis tools to find bugs, and binary code rewriting to patch them. Patching will allow to rejuvenate OTS-based software less frequently, thus further improving the availability of applications using this approach. Future work will implement this approach in a prototype, and validate it on real memory leaks found in complex software. Keywords—Memory leaks; Off-The-Shelf software; dynamic analysis; static analysis; binary analysis; software aging; software rejuvenation I