Research And System Implementation For Pointer Detection In Embedded C Program

Embedded system technology, which is widely applied in many fields, is a hot research area in computer science. The complexity of the pointer itself, coupled with the C language specification not imposing too many restrictions on usage of pointer, make the pointer misuse difficult to avoid, and even lead to serious security risks. In addition, the embedded program development depends on the cross-compiler environment, resulting in the development and testing more difficult. Therefore, the research on defect detection and reliability of the C program pointer has a great significance to ensure the security and stability of the embedded program.Defect detection technology of program is usually divided into two kinds, one is run-time detection method, namely dynamic detection, and the other one does not depend on the program’s running, known as static detection. Both the methods have their advantages, static detection without demands on the compiling and running of the code, perform higher efficiency and can be designed easier, so it is more adapted to the defect inspection of the embedded program in the mode of cross-platform development. The paper proposed the idea of defect inspection based on the model transformation of the source code and defect mode matching, after researching on the static detection theory at home and abroad. Its core idea is that, transform the source code into the XML mapping model, which is complete expression of the source semantic and has a well-structured query capabilities, and build the defect model with XQuery, then drive the pattern matching between the two kinds of models to inspect defect. To adapt to the relevant requirements of the different detection object or environment, this paper proposed the method to build defects knowledge base, so that the system can perform different detection strategies through flexible configuration. In addition, the defects knowledge base makes the system easier to develop and maintain, while greatly enhancing the scalability.Through a lot of testing and results analysis, we verified that the detection system for the pointer safety proposed in this paper has the correctness and practicality. The main work of this research is based on the major incubator program of the National Natural Science Foundation (Space Embedded Software Credibility Measurement Method and System,91018003), and thanks for the Fund Committee’s support on the work of project team.