Validation of Memory Accesses Through Symbolic Analyses

Henrique Nazaré (1) , Izabela Maffra (1) , Willer Santos (1) , Leonardo Oliveira (1) , Fernando Magno Quintão Pereira (1) , Laure Gonnord (2, 3)

1 LLP - Laboratório de Linguagens de Programação
2 COMPSYS - Compilation and embedded computing systems
3 LIP - Laboratoire de l'Informatique du Parallélisme

The C programming language does not prevent out-of- bounds memory accesses. There exist several techniques to secure C programs; however, these methods tend to slow down these programs substantially, because they populate the binary code with runtime checks. To deal with this prob- lem, we have designed and tested two static analyses - sym- bolic region and range analysis - which we combine to re- move the majority of these guards. In addition to the analy- ses themselves, we bring two other contributions. First, we describe live range splitting strategies that improve the effi- ciency and the precision of our analyses. Secondly, we show how to deal with integer overflows, a phenomenon that can compromise the correctness of static algorithms that validate memory accesses. We validate our claims by incorporating our findings into AddressSanitizer. We generate SPEC CINT 2006 code that is 17% faster and 9% more energy efficient than the code produced originally by this tool. Furthermore, our approach is 50% more effective than Pentagons, a state- of-the-art analysis to sanitize memory accesses.

Domaines: Langage de programmation [cs.PL]

Henrique Nazaré, Izabela Maffra, Willer Santos, Leonardo Oliveira, Fernando Magno Quintão Pereira, et al.. Validation of Memory Accesses Through Symbolic Analyses. ACM International Conference on Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages & Applications (OOPSLA'14), Oct 2014, Portland, Oregon, United States. pp.791-809, ⟨10.1145/2660193.2660205⟩. ⟨hal-01006209⟩