[llvm-dev] Pool allocator + safecode

[Ed Robbins via llvm-dev]

Thanks again for the really nice response John.

On Thu, Oct 8, 2015, at 10:14 PM, John Criswell wrote:
> The original llvm-gcc (in which we modified gcc to produce LLVM bitcode) 
> no longer exists.  When GCC was extended to use plugins, someone created 
> the DragonEgg plugin.  I am not sure if that still exists.
> 
> Is there a reason you need a GCC-based front-end?  Clang is intended to 
> be a drop-in replacement for GCC and supports many of the GCC extensions.

The only reason was to make it easier to drop into the toolchain. I
don't anticipate that being a huge amount of work to switch to clang
anyway, but I saw that SafeCode was originally using llvm-gcc so I
thought that might make life easy.

>  Integrating into Clang simply makes it easier to run 
> the SAFECode transformation passes after the LLVM passes have been run.

So basically it means you don't have to run safecode manually?

> DSA is a points-to and call graph analysis.  As such, it is used for 
> many things in addition to APA and SAFECode.  For example, the SMACK 
> verifier uses DSA.

Got it.

> 
> The APA code has been bit rotting for awhile.  While you can compile and 
> run it with LLVM 3.2, it won't work as well as it did for the paper, and 
> it probably needs some work to make it robust.  Please remember that APA 
> has always been a research prototype.
> 

I really want to bring all this into trunk. I've spent this afternoon
chugging through minor API incompatibilities trying to get APA to build.
Not there yet!

> > We really want the all singing all dancing safecode framework with APA
> > as detailed in the 2005 TECS SafeCode paper (Memory Safety Without
> > Garbage Collection for Embedded Applications). We are trying to build a
> > C based embedded system that is type safe at the lowest possible run
> > time cost. So I am also going to modify the uninitialized pointer MMU
> > based stuff to work with the ARM Cortex M3 MPU. I don't think there are
> > any shortcuts here (I'd be happy to be proved wrong though) - we need
> > APA.
> 
> I see.
> 
> If you just need to isolate processes on your system so that they don't 
> overwrite each other, it looks like the ARM Cortex M3 MPU can do that.  
> Is there a reason why that won't work?

Maybe I should have been a bit clearer; we're really interested in full
memory and type safety. We want to harden the system against memory
corruption vulnerabilities. Process isolation isn't an issue, as we are
in an embedded context where we don't have processes. I was really
talking about setting uninitialised pointers to a value that is
configured in the MPU to be inaccessible, and using a handler to abort
in the case where an attempt is made to read/write to any of these
pointers.

> 
> However, if you want to isolate processes using inferred type safety, 
> you will need to address three significant challenges:
> 
> 1) Due to changes in LLVM, DSA has a difficult time inferring types.  In 
> a nutshell, some LLVM optimizations turned typed-getelementptr (GEP) 
> instructions into GEPs that use byte-level indexing.  DSA was written 
> with the assumption that GEPs carried high-level type information.
> 
> I think this is fixable by refactoring DSA's type inference code to act 
> more like Value Set Analysis: it would use a map between a 4-tuple and a 
> type.  The 4-tuple (a, b, c, d) describes a formula ax + b in which a 
> and b denote offset and stride and c and d place a limit on the lower 
> and upper bounds of x.  c and d can be +- infinity, allowing the 4-tuple 
> to denote a type that occurs in an unbounded array.

This sounds like a good idea. I'm willing to give this a go, time
permitting.

> As an FYI, there are multiple research groups interested in accurate 
> points-to analysis results (mine included).  I'll be holding a BoF at 
> the LLVM Developer's meeting this year to discuss who needs what and if 
> there's a way to develop it.

That doesn't surprise me. If someone would like to do this it would be
very handy from my point of view too!

> 
> 2) Making APA robust.  In my personal opinion, the original APA may be 
> more complicated than necessary for your application.  APA currently 
> creates context sensitive pools, which means that it needs to pass pool 
> handles around.  This requires transforming function signatures which 
> makes inter-operating with external code a real pain.  It also makes the 
> transform complicated.
> 
> A simpler design would be to create one pool for each type that DSA 
> infers.  The points-to analysis would not be sound (unless it unified 
> all points-to sets that have the same type), but it would allow all 
> pools (or nearly all pools) to be global variables, greatly simplifying 
> the transformation.  It would also continue to prevent the application 
> from accessing data outside its allocated memory.

We aren't going to need to inter-operate with external code all that
much (if at all), so perhaps this will not be an issue. DSA and the
context sensitive pools of APA (despite the ugly transform) were
originally what attracted us to SafeCode; we would like to remain sound. 

> 
> 3) The version of SAFECode in that paper used the Omega constraint 
> solver to prove that array accesses are safe.  That code has long 
> bit-rotted away, and its implementation was not the most efficient (it 
> exec()'ed the Omega solver for every query).  A better approach today 
> would be to integrate the constraint solver into the compiler proper.  
> Additionally, you now have other tools available, such as CVC4, Z3, and 
> SMACK/Boogie, for building and solving the constraints.

We had already noticed that the limit to linear array access was way
behind state of the art (we have a lot of experience with constraint
solvers). Using an SMT solver would make sense, as you can use the
theory that suits the particular problem - linear isn't good enough?
You've got IDL, octagons etc. 

To start off with we'd like to get something running, even if it has
limitations. Unless you think it's a really bad idea I will for the
moment try to get the old APA working to some extent again. It isn't
really an issue if I have to run APA and safecode as separate parts of
the build process for the moment, or if parts of it are clunky, from our
point of view it would just be good just to get some toy examples
working relatively quickly.

> 
> As an FYI, later versions of SAFECode use run-time checks for 
> type-unsafe pools and array accesses so that it can support the full 
> generality of C (see Dhurjati's PLDI 2007 paper and my SVA 
> publications).  You could probably do something simple in which 
> type-safe data goes into pools and type-unsafe data goes into a large 
> area for which loads and stores are subjected to simple SFI-like 
> instrumentation (e.g., Google Native Client).  There may be solutions in 
> the middle of the spectrum between fast-but-difficult-to-implement and 
> slow-but-easy-to-implement.

We want speed speed speed! If we only support a (preferably large)
subset of C it doesn't matter - this is better than having additional
run time checks. Is there an option to warn whenever a run-time check is
inserted? I'll check out some of the other papers. I read the TECS paper
and gave a few of the others a skim, but looks like I missed some stuff.

Cheers,
Ed