USENIX Annual Technical Conference· 2012
AddressSanitizer: a fast address sanity checker
- 642citations
- 2012year
Short summary
AddressSanitizer (ASan) is a new memory error detector that finds out-of-bounds accesses and use-after-free bugs with only a 73% average slowdown.
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Key points
- AddressSanitizer (ASan) detects heap, stack, and global out-of-bounds accesses.
- ASan identifies use-after-free bugs.
- The tool achieves an average slowdown of 73%.
- ASan has found over 300 previously unknown bugs in the Chromium browser.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
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.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. USENIX Annual Technical Conference, 2012 · DOI ↗
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Field: Hardware and Architecture
Hardware and ArchitectureComputer Science