diff docs/StackSafetyAnalysis.rst @ 147:c2174574ed3a

LLVM 10
author Shinji KONO <kono@ie.u-ryukyu.ac.jp>
date Wed, 14 Aug 2019 16:55:33 +0900
parents
children
line wrap: on
line diff
--- /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
+++ b/docs/StackSafetyAnalysis.rst	Wed Aug 14 16:55:33 2019 +0900
@@ -0,0 +1,56 @@
+==================================
+Stack Safety Analysis
+==================================
+
+
+Introduction
+============
+
+The Stack Safety Analysis determines if stack allocated variables can be
+considered 'safe' from memory access bugs.
+
+The primary purpose of the analysis is to be used by sanitizers to avoid
+unnecessary instrumentation of 'safe' variables. SafeStack is going to be the
+first user.
+
+'safe' variables can be defined as variables that can not be used out-of-scope
+(e.g. use-after-return) or accessed out of bounds. In the future it can be
+extended to track other variable properties. E.g. we plan to extend
+implementation with a check to make sure that variable is always initialized
+before every read to optimize use-of-uninitialized-memory checks.
+
+How it works
+============
+
+The analysis is implemented in two stages:
+
+The intra-procedural, or 'local', stage performs a depth-first search inside
+functions to collect all uses of each alloca, including loads/stores and uses as
+arguments functions. After this stage we know which parts of the alloca are used
+by functions itself but we don't know what happens after it is passed as
+an argument to another function.
+
+The inter-procedural, or 'global', stage, resolves what happens to allocas after
+they are passed as function arguments. This stage performs a depth-first search
+on function calls inside a single module and propagates allocas usage through
+functions calls.
+
+When used with ThinLTO, the global stage performs a whole program analysis over
+the Module Summary Index.
+
+Testing
+=======
+
+The analysis is covered with lit tests.
+
+We expect that users can tolerate false classification of variables as
+'unsafe' when in-fact it's 'safe'. This may lead to inefficient code. However, we
+can't accept false 'safe' classification which may cause sanitizers to miss actual
+bugs in instrumented code. To avoid that we want additional validation tool.
+
+AddressSanitizer may help with this validation. We can instrument all variables
+as usual but additionally store stack-safe information in the
+``ASanStackVariableDescription``. Then if AddressSanitizer detects a bug on
+a 'safe' variable we can produce an additional report to let the user know that
+probably Stack Safety Analysis failed and we should check for a bug in the
+compiler.