Today, large and complex software is developed with integrated components using application programming interfaces (APIs). Correct usage of APIs in practice presents a challenge due to implicit constraints, such as call conditions or call orders. API misuse, i.e., violation of these constraints, is a well-known source of bugs, some of which can cause serious security vulnerabilities. Although researchers have developed many API-misuse detectors over the last two decades, recent studies show that API misuses are still prevalent. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive empirical study on API-misuse bugs in open-source C programs. To understand the nature of API misuses in practice, we analyze 830 API-misuse bugs from six popular programs across different domains. For all the studied bugs, we summarize their root causes, fix patterns and usage statistics. Furthermore, to understand the capabilities and limitations of state-of-the-art static analysis detectors for API-misuse detection, we develop APIMU4C, a dataset of API-misuse bugs in C code based on our empirical study results, and evaluate three widely-used detectors on it qualitatively and quantitatively. We share all the findings and present possible directions towards more powerful API-misuse detectors.

Static analysis has long prevailed as a promising approach to detect program bugs at an early development process to increase software quality. However, such tools face great challenges to balance the false-positive rate and the false-negative rate in practical use. In this paper, we present VBSAC, a value-based static analyzer for C aiming to improve the precision and recall. In our tool, we employ a pluggable value-based analysis strategy. A memory skeleton recorder is designed to maintain the memory objects as a baseline. While traversing the control flow graph, diverse value-based plug-ins analyze the specific abstract domains and share program information to strengthen the computation. Simultaneously, checkers consume the corresponding analysis results to detect bugs. We also provide a user-friendly web interface to help users audit the bug detection results. Evaluation on two widely-used benchmarks shows that we perform better to state-of-the-art bug detection tools by finding 221-339 more bugs and improving F-Score 9.88%-40.32%.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols provide a reliable communication channel between applications over the Internet.Implementations of these protocols (e.g., OpenSSL and GnuTLS) publish wellformat documentation and examples online to guide the usage of SSL/TLS APIs.However, incorrect usages have caused many severe vulnerabilities (e.g., privilege escalation, denial of service, man-in-the-middle attack, etc.) in recent years.In this paper, we introduce SSLDoc to diagnose incorrect SSL API usages in real-world C programs automatically.The key insight behind SSLDoc is a constraint-directed static analysis technique powered by domain-specific usage patterns that we learn from real-world vulnerabilities and bug-fix-related patches.We have instantiated SSLDoc for OpenSSL APIs and applied it to large-scale opensource programs.SSLDoc found 45 previously unknown securitysensitive bugs in OpenSSL implementation and applications in Ubuntu.We created and submitted issues for all of them.Up to now, 35 have been confirmed by the corresponding development communities and 27 have been fixed in master branch.

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) usually have usage constraints, such as call conditions or call orders. Incorrect usage of these constraints, called API misuse, will result in system crashes, bugs, and even security problems. It is crucial to detect such misuses early in the development process. Though many approaches have been proposed over the last years, recent studies show that API misuses are still prevalent, especially the ones specific to individual projects. In this paper, we strive to improve current API-misuse detection capability for large-scale C programs. First, We propose IMSpec, a lightweight domain-specific language enabling developers to specify API usage constraints in three different aspects (i.e., parameter validation, error handling, and causal calling), which are the majority of API-misuse bugs. Then, we have tailored a constraint guided static analysis engine to automatically parse IMSpec rules and detect API-misuse bugs with rich semantics. We evaluate our approach on widely used benchmarks and real-world projects. The results show that our easily extensible approach performs better than state-of-the-art tools. We also discover 19 previously unknown bugs in real-world open-source projects, all of which have been confirmed by the corresponding developers.

Libraries offer reusable functionality through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) with usage constraints such as call conditions or orders. Constraint violations, i.e. API misuses, commonly lead to bugs and security issues. Although researchers have developed various API misuse detectors in the past few decades, recent studies show that API misuse is prevalent in real-world projects, especially for secure socket layer (SSL) certificate validation, which is completely broken in many security-critical applications and libraries. In this paper, we introduce SSLDoc to effectively detect API misuse bugs, specifically for SSL API libraries. The key insight behind SSLDoc is a constraint-directed static analysis technique powered by a domain-specific language (DSL) for specifying API usage constraints. Through studying real-world API misuse bugs, we propose ISpec DSL, which covers majority types of API usage constraints and enables simple but precise specification. Furthermore, we design and implement SSLDoc to automatically parse ISpec into checking targets and employ a static analysis engine to identify potential API misuses and prune false positives with rich semantics. We have instantiated SSLDoc for OpenSSL APIs and applied it to large-scale open-source programs. SSLDoc found 45 previously unknown security-sensitive bugs in OpenSSL implementation and applications in Ubuntu. Up to now, 35 have been confirmed by the corresponding development communities and 27 have been fixed in master branch.