Runtime verification of memory safety via source transformation
Zhe Chen, Junqi Yan, Wenming Li, Ju Qian, Zhiqiu Huang · 2018
The unsafe features of C often lead to memory errors that can result in vulnerabilities. Many runtime verification tools are widely used to detect memory errors. However, existing tools lack DO-178C compliance, show limited performance, and demonstrate poor accessibility, e.g., lacking platform-independence. In this paper, we propose to implement dynamic analysis tools using source-to-source transformation, which operates on the original source code to insert code fragments written in ANSI C, and generates source files similar to the original files in structure. We show that source transformation can effectively avoid the mentioned drawbacks of existing tools, but it also faces many new challenges in implementation.