GCatch: Automatically Detecting Concurrency Bugs in Go

Descriptions

GCatch contains a suite of static detectors aiming to identify concurrency bugs in large, real Go software systems. Concurrency bugs covered by the current version of GCatch include blocking misuse-of-channel (BMOC) bugs, deadlocks caused by misuse of mutexes (\eg, lock-with-unlock, double lock), races on struct fields, and races due to errors when using the testing package. The technical details of GCatch are presented in Section 3 of our ASPLOS paper [1].

Installation and Demonstration

GCatch leverages Z3 for constraint solving. If you have already installed Z3, you can use the install.sh script is to install GCatch. You can also install Z3 together with GCatch using the installZ3.sh script.

After the installation, you can run the run.sh script to execute GCatch on a buggy version of gRPC.

Directories

1. Directory analysis contains static analysis routines shared by multiple checkers (e.g., computing post-dominator).

2. Directory checkers contains code for implementing the checking functionalities.

3. Directory cmd is the entry point of GCatch.

4. Directory config contains configuration files of GCatch.

5. Directory instinfo contains code for analyzing Go SSA instructions.

6. Directory output contains code for printing the detection results.

7. Directory path contains code for computation conducted on CFG.

8. Directory ssabuild contains code for transforming input programs into SSA.

9. Directory syncgraph contains code for interaction with call graph, alias analysis, and Z3.

10. Directory testdata contains a buggy version of gRPC.

11. Directory tests contains toy programs to test traditional checkers.

12. Directory tools contains copies of external packages.

13. Directory util contains utility code shared by different components of GCatch.

Please refer to the demonstration scripts to figure out how to use GCatch’s code.

[1] Ziheng Liu, Shuofei Zhu, Boqin Qin, Hao Chen and Linhai Song. “Automatically Detecting and Fixing Concurrency Bugs in Go Software Systems.” In ASPLOS’2020.