---
title: "A Factor Graph Model for Software Bug Finding"
authors:
  - "Ted Kremenek"
  - "Andrew Y. Ng"
  - "Dawson R. Engler"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2007/404"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2007/0404.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twentieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2007
pages: "2510-2515"
track: ""
keywords:
---

# A Factor Graph Model for Software Bug Finding

Ted Kremenek, Andrew Y. Ng, Dawson R. Engler

*Proceedings of the Twentieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 2510-2515.

## Abstract

Automatic tools for finding software errors require knowledge of the rules a program must obey, or specifications, before they can identify bugs. We present a method that combines factor graphs and static program analysis to automatically infer specifications directly from programs. We illustrate the approach on inferring functions in C programs that allocate and release resources, and evaluate the approach on three codebases: SDL, OpenSSH, and the OS kernel for Mac OS X (XNU). The inferred specifications are highly accurate and with them we have discovered numerous bugs.