TY - GEN
T1 - Detecting and analyzing year 2038 problem bugs in user-level applications
AU - Suzuki, Keita
AU - Kubota, Takafumi
AU - Kono, Kenji
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by JST CREST Grant Number JPMJCR19F3, Japan.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 IEEE.
PY - 2019/12
Y1 - 2019/12
N2 - The year 2038 problem is a well-known year problem that might cause severe damage to many existing software systems. However, no current tool can detect the bugs since it requires the understandings of the problem unique encoding semantics. In this paper, we analyze real-world applications and raise the alarm over the fact that the Year 2038 problem is a real threat. We target all of the C based projects uploaded on GitHub in the years 2012 to 2018 (32,921 in total), between the dates July 1 to July 10. Our analysis shows that 7.35% of the compiled projects have bugs. Some of the bugs trigger undefined behavior and are dangerous enough to crash the software systems. Our bug fixing patches sent to six projects have been confirmed and approved, including large-scale, real-world projects such as the Amazon Web Service support tools and the Linux Test Project.
AB - The year 2038 problem is a well-known year problem that might cause severe damage to many existing software systems. However, no current tool can detect the bugs since it requires the understandings of the problem unique encoding semantics. In this paper, we analyze real-world applications and raise the alarm over the fact that the Year 2038 problem is a real threat. We target all of the C based projects uploaded on GitHub in the years 2012 to 2018 (32,921 in total), between the dates July 1 to July 10. Our analysis shows that 7.35% of the compiled projects have bugs. Some of the bugs trigger undefined behavior and are dangerous enough to crash the software systems. Our bug fixing patches sent to six projects have been confirmed and approved, including large-scale, real-world projects such as the Amazon Web Service support tools and the Linux Test Project.
KW - Bug analysis
KW - Bug detection
KW - Software dependability
KW - Y2038 problem
KW - Year problem
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U2 - 10.1109/PRDC47002.2019.00028
DO - 10.1109/PRDC47002.2019.00028
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85078402878
T3 - Proceedings of IEEE Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing, PRDC
SP - 65
EP - 74
BT - Proceedings - 2019 IEEE 24th Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing, PRDC 2019
PB - IEEE Computer Society
T2 - 24th IEEE Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing, PRDC 2019
Y2 - 1 December 2019 through 3 December 2019
ER -