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Build Themis with sanitizers #548

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merged 5 commits into from
Nov 8, 2019
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@ilammy ilammy commented Oct 1, 2019

This is another patch set that I have found in my repo and never cared to merge. It makes Themis a safer place for writing new C code by ensuring that the code does not do anything funny, like causing obvious memory safety issues or glaring undefined behavior.

A bunch of new Makefile configuration options enable various sanitizers available for GCC and Clang:

  • WITH_ASAN – Address Sanitizer, mostly memory safety issues
  • WITH_MSAN – Memory Sanitizer, other types of memory safety
  • WITH_TSAN – Thread Sanitizer, mostly locks and threading
  • WITH_UBSAN – Undefined Behavior Sanitizer, various issues

The exact supported set of the sanitizers vary depending on the compiler type and version so we check for them at startup and use only those which are available. UBSan is especially different between GCC and Clang.

Obviously, these are opt-in options which are not enabled by default. They are useful during development but should not affect production builds.

Teach CircleCI to exercise the test suite with all available sanitizers, failing the build if any sanitizer reports a possible violation. Unfortunately, some sanitizers are not available on all compilers, and some produce a lot of unrelated errors so they are currently disabled.

In particular, UBSan currently produces some strict warnings about our code. They are mostly caused by third-party code and some known legacy warts, which have been silenced for now. Other reported instances are fixed right away. See individual commit message for details.

ilammy and others added 5 commits October 1, 2019 17:46
Add a bunch of configuration options to enable various sanitizers
available for GCC and Clang:

  - WITH_ASAN - Address Sanitizer, mostly memory safety issues
  - WITH_MSAN - Memory Sanitizer, other types of memory safety
  - WITH_TSAN - Thread Sanitizer, mostly locks and threading
  - WITH_UBSAN - Undefined Behavior Sanitizer, various issues

The exact supported set of the sanitizers vary depending on the compiler
version so we check for them at startup and use only those which are
available. UBSan is especially different between GCC and Clang.

Obviously, these are opt-in options which are not enabled by default.
They are useful during development but should not affect production
builds.

There is also an option to make sanitizer warnings fatal which will be
useful for CI. Normally the developers do not need to enable it so that
they see all issues, but for CI we would like to abort the build if the
sanitizers report any issues.
Teach CircleCI to execrise the test suite with all available sanitizers.
Unfortunately, some sanitizers are not available on all compilers, and
some produce a lot of unrelated errors so they are currently disabled.
Unfortunately, there are quite a few places which trigger UBSan
(and rightly so). Currently we don't have time to review and fix
them properly, so let's disable the relevant warnings for now.

ed25519 implementation has been written by C gurus and has some
questionable numeric code. These warnings could be avoided by
refactoring the code to use correct types and casts, but it
requires careful attention. Leave it as is for now.

Other warnings are caused by misaligned accesses when handling
soter_container_t types. Everywhere in our codebase we cast
pointers to arbitrarily aligned bytes to C structs and technically
this is undefined behavior because on some processor architectures
it may cause CPU exceptions. This has been known for a long time,
but we did nothing about it. Silence these warnings for now, but
we'd better fix them at some point in the future so that we don't
have to maintain this exclusion blacklist.

And by the way, GCC does not support -fsanitize-blacklist so we
have disabled UBSan for GCC completely. The alternative is to
annotate affected functions with an attribute, but there are so
many of them that I don't want to litter history with it.
The code expects the size field to contain unsigned size, but the
structure definition has signed size. We never use negative values
for anything, but expect the correct overflow behavior. One of the
tests actually triggers UBSan warning about this.

Switch the type to correct uint32_t to have the correct behavior.

This is technically public API, however no-one should be using
the structure field directly because it's encoded in big endian.
Switching to unsigned type also does not change the ABI (on the
platforms that we care about), so all in all this is a safe fix.
UBSan gives us another warning about using "~0L" expression to get
"all 1-bits" initialization value. Technically, this is undefined
behavior because you cannot bit-flip a signed value and you cannot
cast a negative signed value into an unsigned one.

Just use a different equivalent initializer which expresses the same
idea and keeps UBSan happy.
@ilammy ilammy added infrastructure Automated building and packaging tests Themis test suite labels Oct 1, 2019
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thank you! i think it makes a lot of sense

@ilammy ilammy merged commit 0d97f5b into cossacklabs:master Nov 8, 2019
@ilammy ilammy deleted the sanitizers branch November 8, 2019 00:55
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