Casper: Debugging Null Dereferences with Ghosts and Causality Traces
Benoit Cornu, Earl T. Barr, Lionel Seinturier, Martin Monperrus · arXiv (Cornell University) · 2015
Fixing a software error requires understanding its root cause. In this paper, we introduce traces, crafted execution traces augmented with the information needed to reconstruct the causal chain from the root cause of a bug to an execution error. We propose an approach and a tool, called Casper, for dynamically constructing causality traces for null dereference errors. The core idea of Casper is to inject special values, called ghosts, into the execution stream to construct the causality trace at runtime. We evaluate our contribution by providing and assessing the causality traces of 14 real null dereference bugs collected over six large, popular open-source projects. Over this data set, Casper builds a causality trace in less than 5 seconds.