End-to-End Prediction of Buffer Overruns from Raw Source Code via Neural Memory Networks

Detecting buffer overruns from a source code is one of the most common and yet challenging tasks in program analysis. Current approaches have mainly relied on rigid rules and handcrafted features devised by a few experts, limiting themselves in terms of flexible applicability and robustness due to diverse bug patterns and characteristics existing in sophisticated real-world software programs. In this paper, we propose a novel, data-driven approach that is completely end-to-end without requiring any hand-crafted features, thus free from any program language-specific structural limitations. In particular, our approach leverages a recently proposed neural network model called memory networks that have shown the state-of-the-art performances mainly in question-answering tasks. Our experimental results using source codes demonstrate that our proposed model is capable of accurately detecting simple buffer overruns. We also present in-depth analyses on how a memory network can learn to understand the semantics in programming languages solely from raw source codes, such as tracing variables of interest, identifying numerical values, and performing their quantitative comparisons.