[cfe-dev] [cfe-users] Removing or obfuscating RTTI type name strings

[Richard Smith via cfe-dev]

On Fri, 27 Aug 2021 at 11:03, Andy Gibbs via cfe-users <
cfe-users at lists.llvm.org> wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> I'm hitting a rather difficult problem.  I have to compile with RTTI data
> structures generated because, even though I am not using dynamic_cast or
> typeid in my application code, I am linking and using a library that does
> use dynamic_cast.  Therefore my code will crash if I compile with -fno-rtti.
>
> The problem is, then, that the size of my code is greatly increased, and
> also (which is more important) critical information is being leached into
> the resulting application binary by the RTTI type name string that is
> generated.  Unlike normal symbols, these cannot be stripped from the
> executable.
>
> Therefore I would like to make a change to the clang compiler to either
> replace all the type name strings with a single "?" string (this would be
> best) or doing something like a rot-x encryption on the complete string (I
> would rather not do this since these strings are literally hundreds of
> characters long given that the types are complex template types).
>
> My suggestion would be that I would attempt to add a -fno-rtti-names
> parameter.  If this is of interest to the general clang community I would
> be happy to submit a patch for consideration, but at the very least I need
> something for my own purposes.
>
> This brings me to my request.  I would be very grateful if someone here
> might be able to direct me into the right place for making such a change.
>
> Looking at the source code there is a
> ItaniumRTTIBuilder::BuildTypeInfo(...) function in
> CodeGen/ItaniumCXXABI.cpp (see
> https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/fe177a1773e4f88dde1aa37d34a0d3f8cb582f14/clang/lib/CodeGen/ItaniumCXXABI.cpp#L3730).
> In there, the first thing it does is lay down a field for the mangled type
> name.  My guess is that it should be possible to substitute the line
>
>     llvm::GlobalVariable *TypeName = GetAddrOfTypeName(Ty, Linkage);
>
> with something that generates a static string "?" and returns the address
> of that.  Then it will build the table pointing at this string, I am
> guessing.
>
> Is this a feasible approach or will this break loads of things elsewhere
> in the compiler and/or c++ runtime?  I am not interested in a run-time
> ability to get the mangled (or otherwise) name of the class, so if
> replacing this string has no effect on, for example, the correction
> function of dynamic_cast or typeid and only means that std::type_info::name
> returns a bogus value, then I'm happy with that.
>

The address and (sometimes) contents of the _ZTS type_info name are used
for type_info equality comparisons. The implementation of dynamic_cast
internally uses type_info comparisons to find the destination type within
the source type's type_info tree. So changing the contents of the string to
be non-unique may lead to problems, especially if the ABI rule in question
results in the use of strcmp. You could perhaps instead consider replacing
the string contents with something like a hash of the mangled name of the
type (though be aware that the ABI library will want to interpret it as a
nul-terminated byte string).
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