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A code sanitizer is a programming tool that detects bugs in the form of undefined or suspicious behavior by a compiler inserting instrumentation code at runtime. The class of tools was first introduced by Google's AddressSanitizer (or ASan) of 2012, which uses directly mapped shadow memory to detect memory corruption such as buffer overflows or accesses to a dangling pointer (use-after-free).
Visualization of a software buffer overflow. Data is written into A, but is too large to fit within A, so it overflows into B.. In programming and information security, a buffer overflow or buffer overrun is an anomaly whereby a program writes data to a buffer beyond the buffer's allocated memory, overwriting adjacent memory locations.
Automatic memory management in the form of garbage collection is the most common technique for preventing some of the memory safety problems, since it prevents common memory safety errors like use-after-free for all data allocated within the language runtime. [11]
Canaries or canary words or stack cookies are known values that are placed between a buffer and control data on the stack to monitor buffer overflows. When the buffer overflows, the first data to be corrupted will usually be the canary, and a failed verification of the canary data will therefore alert of an overflow, which can then be handled, for example, by invalidating the corrupted data.
A memory leak may also happen when an object is stored in memory but cannot be accessed by the running code (i.e. unreachable memory). [2] A memory leak has symptoms similar to a number of other problems and generally can only be diagnosed by a programmer with access to the program's source code.
[1] [2] Stack buffer overflow bugs are caused when a program writes more data to a buffer located on the stack than what is actually allocated for that buffer. This almost always results in corruption of adjacent data on the stack, and in cases where the overflow was triggered by mistake, will often cause the program to crash or operate ...
A memory debugger is a debugger for finding software memory problems such as memory leaks and buffer overflows. These are due to bugs related to the allocation and deallocation of dynamic memory . Programs written in languages that have garbage collection , such as managed code , might also need memory debuggers, e.g. for memory leaks due to ...
Accessing such memory usually causes operating system exceptions, that most commonly lead to a program crash (unless suitable memory protection software is being used). Using memory beyond the memory that was allocated (buffer overflow): If an array is used in a loop, with incorrect terminating condition, memory beyond the array bounds may be ...