[go: nahoru, domu]

GWP-ASan

GWP-ASan is a debug tool intended to detect heap memory errors in the wild. It samples allocations to a debug allocator, similar to ElectricFence or Page Heap, causing memory errors to crash and report additional debugging context about the error.

Allocator

The GuardedPageAllocator returns allocations on pages buffered on both sides by guard pages. The allocations are either left- or right-aligned to detect buffer overflows and underflows. When an allocation is freed, the page is marked inaccessible so use-after-frees cause an exception (until that page is reused for another allocation.)

The allocator saves stack traces on every allocation and deallocation to preserve debug context if that allocation results in a memory error.

The allocator implements a quarantine mechanism by allocating virtual memory for more allocations than the total number of physical pages it can return at any given time. The difference forms a rudimentary quarantine.

Because pages are re-used for allocations, it‘s possible that a long-lived use-after-free will cause a crash long after the original allocation has been replaced. In order to decrease the likelihood of incorrect stack traces being reported, we allocate a lot of virtual memory but don’t store metadata for every allocation. That way though we may not be able to report the metadata for an old allocation, we will not report incorrect stack traces.

Crash handler

The allocator is designed so that memory errors with GWP-ASan allocations intentionally trigger invalid access exceptions. A hook in the crashpad crash handler process inspects crashes, determines if they are GWP-ASan exceptions, and adds additional debug information to the crash minidump if so.

The crash handler hook determines if the exception was related to GWP-ASan by reading the allocator internals and seeing if the exception address was within the bounds of the allocator region. If it is, the crash handler hook extracts debug information about that allocation, such as thread IDs and stack traces for allocation (and deallocation, if relevant) and writes it to the crash dump.

The crash handler runs with elevated privileges so parsing information from a lesser-privileged process is security sensitive. The GWP-ASan hook is specially structured to minimize the amount of allocator logic it relies on and to validate the allocator internals before reasoning about them.

Status

GWP-ASan is implemented for malloc and PartitionAlloc, but not for Oilpan or v8, on Windows and macOS. It is currently enabled by default for malloc. The allocator parameters can be manually modified by using an invocation like the following:

chrome --enable-features="GwpAsanMalloc<Study" \
       --force-fieldtrials=Study/Group1 \
       --force-fieldtrial-params=Study.Group1:MaxAllocations/128/MaxMetadata/255/TotalPages/4096/AllocationSamplingFrequency/1000/ProcessSamplingProbability/1.0

GWP-ASan is tuned more aggressively in canary/dev, to increase the likelihood we catch newly introduced bugs, and for specific processes depending on the particular allocator.

A hotlist of bugs discovered by by GWP-ASan exists, though GWP-ASan crashes are filed without external visibility by default.

Limitations

  • GWP-ASan is configured with a small fixed-size amount of memory, so long-lived allocations can quickly deplete the page pool and lead the allocator to run out of memory. Depending on the sampling frequency and distribution of allocation lifetimes this may lead to only allocations early in the process lifetime being sampled.
  • Allocations over a page in size are not sampled.
  • The allocator skips zero-size allocations. Zero-size allocations on some platforms return valid pointers and may be subject to lifetime and bounds issues.
  • GWP-ASan does not intercept allocations for Oilpan or the v8 GC.
  • GWP-ASan does not hook PDFium's fork of PartitionAlloc.
  • Right-aligned allocations to catch overflows are not perfectly right-aligned, so small out-of-bounds accesses may be missed.

Testing

There is not yet a way to intentionally trigger a GWP-ASan exception.

There is not yet a way to inspect GWP-ASan data in a minidump (crash report) without access to Google's crash service.