Collaboration Summit 2013 - AddressSanitizer/ThreadSanitizer for Linux Kernel
Channel: The Linux Foundation
Date: 20/04/2013

The Linux Foundation
Collaboration Summit 2013
San Francisco, California
AddressSanitizer/ThreadSanitizer for Linux Kernel and Userspace
By Konstantin Serebryany & Dmitry Vukov

AddressSanitizer (ASan) is a tool that finds buffer overflows (in stack, heap and globals) and use-after-free bugs in C/C++ programs. ThreadSanitizer (TSan) finds data races in C/C++ and Go programs. Both tools are based on compiler instrumentation (LLVM and GCC), which makes them fast (e.g. ASan incurs just 2x slowdown) and more applicable for testing the Kernel. We will share our experience in applying these tools to user-space programs (2000+ security bugs found in 2 years) and discuss our experiments with ASan for Kernel. 
The talk will be interesting to software engineers who develop and test C/C++ code, both user-space and Kernel. You will learn how the tools work for user-space and our thoughts about the Kernel implementation. We have presented related topics at the LLVM developer meetings, GNU Tools Cauldron, USENIX ATC, etc; here we will focus on the Kernel-related issues.