The CoLiS platform for the analysis of maintainer scripts in Debian software packages

Abstract

The software packages of the Debian distribution include more than twenty-seven thousand maintainer scripts in total, almost all of them being written in the Posix shell language. These scripts are executed with root privileges at installation, update, and removal of a package, which makes them critical for system maintenance. While the Debian policy provides guidance for package maintainers producing the scripts, only few tools exist to check the compliance of a script to that policy. We present CoLiS, a software platform for discovering violations of non-trivial properties required by the Debian policy in maintainer scripts. We describe our methodology which is based on symbolic execution and feature tree constraints, and we give an overview of the toolchain. We obtain promising results: our toolchain is effective in analysing a large set of Debian maintainer scripts, and it has already detected over 150 policy violations that have lead to bug reports, more than two-third of them now being fixed.