Detecting memory errors at runtime with source-level instrumentation

Abstract

The unsafe language features of C, such as low-level control of memory, often lead to memory errors, which can result in silent data corruption, security vulnerabilities, and program crashes. Dynamic analysis tools, which have been widely used for detecting memory errors at runtime, usually perform instrumentation at the IR-level or binary-level. However, their underlying non-source-level instrumentation techniques have three inherent limitations: optimization sensitivity, platform dependence and DO-178C non-compliance. Due to optimization sensitivity, these tools are used to trade either performance for effectiveness by compiling the program at -O0 or effectiveness for performance by compiling the program at a higher optimization level, say, -O3. In this paper, we overcome these three limitations by proposing a new source-level instrumentation technique and implementing it in a new dynamic analysis tool, called MOVEC, in a pointer-based instrumentation framework. Validation against a set of 86 microbenchmarks (with ground truth) and a set of 10 MiBench benchmarks shows that MOVEC outperforms state-of-the-art tools, SoftBoundCETS, Google's AddressSanitizer and Valgrind, in terms of both effectiveness and performance considered together.