null pointer

Null Pointer: "Before the Microsoft-centric developer world goes completely gaga at the company's Professional Developer Conference in the coming days, it's worth noting a couple of open source milestones that may have slipped under the radar."

InternetNews: "Latest Coverity Scan report shows lower defect densities but NULL pointer errors are still common"

LWN.net: "...it should be safe to assume that steps were taken to prevent null pointer vulnerabilities from opening up systems in the future.

The reality is that some things have truly improved, but that some important vulnerabilities remain."

cr0 blog: "Tavis Ormandy and myself have recently found and investigated a Linux kernel vulnerability.

It affects all 2.4 and 2.6 kernels since 2001 on all architectures. We believe this is the public vulnerability affecting the greatest number of kernel versions."

The problem of void calls, or null pointer dereferencing, plagues programs written in any language using pointers or references with a "null" or "void" value.

Tony Hoare recently described it as his "one-billion dollar mistake". The problem is very simple to state: in the typical object-oriented call

x.f (args)

x, a reference, should normally denote an object but can be void, in which case the call will fail and produce an exception, often leading to a crash.

This is one of the main sources of instability in today's software.

Detecting Data Race and Atomicity Violation via Typestate-Guided Static Analysis.

Yue Yang, Anna Gringauze, Dinghao Wu, Henning Rohde. Aug. 2008

The correctness of typestate properties in a multithreaded program often depends on the assumption of certain concurrency invariants.

However, standard typestate analysis and concurrency analysis are disjoint in that the former is unable to understand threading effects and the latter does not take typestate properties into consideration.