Document Type
Thesis
Date of Award
5-31-2026
Degree Name
Master of Science in Cyber Security and Privacy - (M.S.)
Department
Computer Science
First Advisor
Martin Kellogg
Second Advisor
Reza Curtmola
Third Advisor
Haotian Zhang
Abstract
Resource leaks occur when a limited resource such as memory is allocated by a program and needlessly held past the point of use. Leaks can lead to a degradation of services which can be specifically triggered with malicious behavior, for example abusing a memory leak in a program to cause a server to slow down and crash for a denial-of-service attack.
Prior work has demonstrated that accumulation analysis provides a sound detection of resource leaks with a working implementation for programs written in Java. While useful, current implementations are limited to programs written in Java, which has a garbage collector, limiting its usefulness for preventing memory leaks, where an allocated segment of memory is not properly freed. Most memory leaks occur in programs written in languages without a garbage collector. We expand accumulation analysis to the domain of memory management and implement accumulation analysis on the intermediate representation of LLVM, allowing for accumulation analysis to detect resource leaks in languages like C and C++, where memory leaks are common.
Recommended Citation
Blacha, Robert, "Sound detection of memory leaks in llvm ir programs using accumulation analysis" (2026). Theses. 3548.
https://digitalcommons.njit.edu/theses/3548
