Towards Automatic Exception Safety Verification

Many programming languages provide exceptions as a structured way for detecting and recovering from abnormal conditions. However, using exceptions properly is non-trivial. Programmers are often careless when handling exceptions, and exception related mistakes are common in software products. We present a technique for verifying that exceptions are used in a safe way. This technique integrates static analysis with model checking to visit all possible exception-raising execution paths. To demonstrate the potential utility of our approach, we applied it to two open source Java applications.