Tools to detect memory anomaly in C/C++ programming

Introduction

Laymen explanation

If you have used pointers, you might be aware of its associated strength and risk. A bad pointer can result in crash due to various reasons. It can be accessing invalid memory or corrupting stack. These issues are generally hard to reproduce/debug making life more difficult. How to detect such issue at earliest and so, prevent it? Code review is the best. However, using automated tool to review code at runtime will be feasible for fairly big chunk of code.

Technical explanation

There are various tools available for handling memory. Moreover, GCC compiler also provides option for enabling such checks. GCC option will normally provide easier way to produce binary which enables memory check at runtime.

AddressSanitizer tool for memory error

Description

AddressSanitizer (or ASan) is a programming tool 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 can be currently enabled in GCC (starting from version 4.8[2]) using -fsanitize=address flag. On average, the instrumentation increases processing time by about 73% and memory usage by 340%.[3]

Useful links

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AddressSanitizer

https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.8/changes.html

LeakSanitizer tool for memory leak

Description

LeakSanitizer is a run-time memory leak detector. It can be combined with AddressSanitizer to get both memory error and leak detection, or used in a stand-alone mode. LSan adds almost no performance overhead until the very end of the process, at which point there is an extra leak detection phase.

Useful links

http://clang.llvm.org/docs/LeakSanitizer.html

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31177633/how-to-find-memory-leaks-with-clang

GCC option for memory leak

Description

GCC has included -fsanitize=leak option for enabling memory leak detection.

Useful links

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Instrumentation-Options.html

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31210053/gcc-and-fsanitize-leak

Valgrind

Description

Valgrind is an instrumentation framework for building dynamic analysis tools. There are Valgrind tools that can automatically detect many memory management and threading bugs, and profile your programs in detail. You can also use Valgrind to build new tools.

Useful link

http://valgrind.org/

mtrace for memory leak

Description

mtrace is the memory debugger included in the GNU C Library.

Useful link

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mtrace

Reference

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AddressSanitizer

https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.8/changes.html

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31210053/gcc-and-fsanitize-leak