Better debugger
Integer overflows are one of the most common bugs in computer programs — not only causing programs to crash but, even worse, potentially offering points of attack for malicious hackers. Computer scientists have devised a battery of techniques to identify them, but all have drawbacks. This month, at the Association for Computing Machinery’s International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) will present a new algorithm for identifying integer-overflow bugs. The researchers tested the algorithm on five common open-source programs, in which previous analyses had found three bugs. The new algorithm found all three known bugs — and 11 new ones. The variables used by computer programs come in a few standard types, such as floating-point numbers, which can contain decimals; characters, like the letters of this sentence; or integers, which are whole numbers. Every time the program creates...