[Colloq] [Hiring Talk] Thursday2/14 11:00am 149CN Jeffrey Foster

[Rachel Bates]

*****************     FACULTY HIRING TALK    **********************

Thursday, February 14, 11:00 a.m.
Room 149 CN

Type Qualifiers:  Lightweight Specifications to Improve Software Quality
Jeffrey S. Foster
UC Berkeley

Abstract

Software continues to increase in size and complexity, yet programmers
have few practical tools and techniques to ensure its quality.  In
this talk I will discuss type qualifiers, a lightweight, practical
mechanism for specifying and checking properties not captured by
traditional type systems.  I will describe efficient type qualifier
inference algorithms, including a lazy, constraint-based
flow-sensitive inference algorithm that explicitly models pointers,
heap-allocated data, and aliasing.

As part of my research I have built cqual, a tool for adding new type
qualifiers to C.  During the talk I will demonstrate two applications
of cqual: finding format-string bugs, a particular kind of security
vulnerability, in C programs, and detecting simple deadlocks in the
Linux kernel.  I will also discuss experiments in which we found a
number of format-string bugs and potential deadlocks.

More information about cqual, including source code and a web-based
demonstration, can be found at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jfoster/cqual

Host:
Matthias Felleisen