AddressSanitizer

AddressSanitizer (or ASan) is an open source programming tool by Google that detects memory corruption bugs such as buffer overflows or accesses to a dangling pointer (use-after-free). AddressSanitizer is based on compiler instrumentation and directly-mapped shadow memory. AddressSanitizer is currently implemented in Clang (starting from version 3.1) and GCC (starting from version 4.8). On average, the instrumentation increases processing time by about 73% and memory usage by 340%.

Chromium and Firefox developers are active users of AddressSanitizer; the tool has found hundreds of bugs in these web browsers. A number of bugs were found in FFmpeg and FreeType. The Linux kernel has enabled the AddressSanitizer for the x86-64 architecture as of Linux version 4.0.

The KernelAddressSanitizer (KASAN) detects dynamic memory errors in the Linux kernel. Kernel instrumentation requires a special feature in the compiler supplying the -fsanitize=kernel-address command line option, since kernels do not use the same address space as normal programs.

AddressSanitizer does not prevent any uninitialized memory reads, and only prevents some use-after-return bugs. It is also not capable of preventing all arbitrary memory corruption bugs. Arbitrary write bugs due to integer underflow/overflows (when the integer with undefined behavior is used to calculate memory address offsets). Adjacent buffers in structs and classes are not protected from overflow, in part to prevent breaking backwards compatibility.

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