Dmitry Vyukov
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Memory safety in C and C++ remains largely unresolved.
A technique usually called “memory tagging” may dramatically improve the situation if implemented in hardware with reasonable overhead. This paper describes two existing implementations of memory tagging: one is the full hardware implementation in SPARC; the other is a partially hardware-assisted compiler-based tool for AArch64. We describe the basic idea, evaluate the two implementations, and explain how they improve memory safety.
This paper is intended to initiate a wider discussion of memory tagging and to motivate the CPU and OS vendors to add support for it in the near future.
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Memory access bugs, including buffer overflows and
uses of freed heap memory, remain a serious problem for
programming languages like C and C++. Many memory
error detectors exist, but most of them are either slow or
detect a limited set of bugs, or both.
This paper presents AddressSanitizer, a new memory
error detector. Our tool finds out-of-bounds accesses to
heap, stack, and global objects, as well as use-after-free
bugs. It employs a specialized memory allocator and
code instrumentation that is simple enough to be implemented in any compiler, binary translation system, or
even in hardware.
AddressSanitizer achieves efficiency without sacrificing comprehensiveness. Its average slowdown is just
73% yet it accurately detects bugs at the point of occurrence. It has found over 300 previously unknown bugs in
the Chromium browser and many bugs in other software.
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Data races are among the most difficult to detect and costly
bugs. Race detection has been studied widely, but none of the existing tools satisfies the requirements of high speed, detailed reports and wide availability at the same time. We describe our attempt to create a tool that works fast, has detailed and understandable reports and is available on a variety of platforms. The race detector is based on our previous work, ThreadSanitizer, and the instrumentation is done using the LLVM compiler. We show that applying compiler instrumentation and sampling reduces the slowdown to less than 1.5x, fast enough for interactive use.
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