Developing a sanitizer

A sanitizer is a kind of technique that checks certain runtime properties of the code (probe) that's inserted by the compiler. People usually use a sanitizer to ensure program correctness or enforce security policies. To give you an idea of how a sanitizer works, let's use one of the most popular sanitizers in Clang as an example – the address sanitizer.

An example of using an address sanitizer

Let's assume we have some simple C code, such as the following:

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
  int buffer[3];
  for (int i = 1; i < argc; ++i)
    buffer[i-1] = atoi(argv[i]);
  for (int i = 1; i < argc; ++i)
    printf("%d ", buffer[i-1]);
  printf("\n");
  return 0;
}

The preceding code converted the command-line arguments into integers and stored them in a buffer of size 3. Then, we printed them out.

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