Detecting and Analyzing Year 2038 Problem Bugs in User-Level Applications

The year 2038 problem is a well-known year problem that might cause severe damage to many existing software systems. However, no current tool can detect the bugs since it requires the understandings of the problem unique encoding semantics. In this paper, we analyze real-world applications and raise the alarm over the fact that the Year 2038 problem is a real threat. We target all of the C based projects uploaded on GitHub in the years 2012 to 2018 (32,921 in total), between the dates July 1 to July 10. Our analysis shows that 7.35% of the compiled projects have bugs. Some of the bugs trigger undefined behavior and are dangerous enough to crash the software systems. Our bug fixing patches sent to six projects have been confirmed and approved, including large-scale, real-world projects such as the Amazon Web Service support tools and the Linux Test Project.