Introduction¶

AddressSanitizer is a fast memory error detector. It consists of a compiler instrumentation module and a run-time library. The tool can detect the following types of bugs:

• Out-of-bounds accesses to heap, stack and globals
• Use-after-free
• Use-after-return (to some extent)
• Double-free, invalid free

Typical slowdown introduced by AddressSanitizer is 2x.

How to build¶

Follow the clang build instructions. CMake build is supported.

Usage¶

Simply compile and link your program with -fsanitize=address flag. The AddressSanitizer run-time library should be linked to the final executable, so make sure to use clang (not ld) for the final link step. When linking shared libraries, the AddressSanitizer run-time is not linked, so -Wl,-z,defs may cause link errors (don’t use it with AddressSanitizer). To get a reasonable performance add -O1 or higher. To get nicer stack traces in error messages add -fno-omit-frame-pointer. To get perfect stack traces you may need to disable inlining (just use -O1) and tail call elimination (-fno-optimize-sibling-calls).

% cat example_UseAfterFree.cc
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
  int *array = new int[100];
  delete [] array;
  return array[argc];  // BOOM
}

# Compile and link
% clang -O1 -g -fsanitize=address -fno-omit-frame-pointer example_UseAfterFree.cc

or:

# Compile
% clang -O1 -g -fsanitize=address -fno-omit-frame-pointer -c example_UseAfterFree.cc
# Link
% clang -g -fsanitize=address example_UseAfterFree.o

If a bug is detected, the program will print an error message to stderr and exit with a non-zero exit code. Currently, AddressSanitizer does not symbolize its output, so you may need to use a separate script to symbolize the result offline (this will be fixed in future).

% ./a.out 2> log
% projects/compiler-rt/lib/asan/scripts/asan_symbolize.py / < log | c++filt
==9442== ERROR: AddressSanitizer heap-use-after-free on address 0x7f7ddab8c084 at pc 0x403c8c bp 0x7fff87fb82d0 sp 0x7fff87fb82c8
READ of size 4 at 0x7f7ddab8c084 thread T0
    #0 0x403c8c in main example_UseAfterFree.cc:4
    #1 0x7f7ddabcac4d in __libc_start_main ??:0
0x7f7ddab8c084 is located 4 bytes inside of 400-byte region [0x7f7ddab8c080,0x7f7ddab8c210)
freed by thread T0 here:
    #0 0x404704 in operator delete[](void*) ??:0
    #1 0x403c53 in main example_UseAfterFree.cc:4
    #2 0x7f7ddabcac4d in __libc_start_main ??:0
previously allocated by thread T0 here:
    #0 0x404544 in operator new[](unsigned long) ??:0
    #1 0x403c43 in main example_UseAfterFree.cc:2
    #2 0x7f7ddabcac4d in __libc_start_main ??:0
==9442== ABORTING

AddressSanitizer exits on the first detected error. This is by design. One reason: it makes the generated code smaller and faster (both by ~5%). Another reason: this makes fixing bugs unavoidable. With Valgrind, it is often the case that users treat Valgrind warnings as false positives (which they are not) and don’t fix them.

#if defined(__has_feature)
#  if __has_feature(address_sanitizer)
// code that builds only under AddressSanitizer
#  endif
#endif

Supported Platforms¶

AddressSanitizer is supported on

• Linux i386/x86_64 (tested on Ubuntu 10.04 and 12.04);
• MacOS 10.6, 10.7 and 10.8 (i386/x86_64).

Support for Linux ARM (and Android ARM) is in progress (it may work, but is not guaranteed too).

Limitations¶

• AddressSanitizer uses more real memory than a native run. Exact overhead depends on the allocations sizes. The smaller the allocations you make the bigger the overhead is.
• AddressSanitizer uses more stack memory. We have seen up to 3x increase.
• On 64-bit platforms AddressSanitizer maps (but not reserves) 16+ Terabytes of virtual address space. This means that tools like ulimit may not work as usually expected.
• Static linking is not supported.

Current Status¶

AddressSanitizer is fully functional on supported platforms starting from LLVM 3.1. The test suite is integrated into CMake build and can be run with make check-asan command.

More Information¶

http://code.google.com/p/address-sanitizer