EXECUTION FAILURE INVESTIGATION USING STATIC ANALYSIS

When, during debugging, a program failure occurs, the location of the failure is determined. First the address in the stack related to the program failure is found. Then static analysis is performed in order to determine a possible culprit for the failure. For example, when a security cookie has been overwritten, indicating a probable overflow, the location of the security cookie on the stack is determined, and proximate storage structures (such as arrays) which may have overflowed onto the location of the security cookie are determined. Then static analysis is used to determine probable sources (e.g. functions or instructions in a function) for this error. In this way, the root cause of a buffer overflow or similar problem can be identified easily, rather than requiring extensive time and knowledge regarding the working of the compiler, the security cookie, the stack, static analysis, and the source code.