NeonGoby is a system for effectively detecting errors in alias analysis, one of the most important and widely used program analysis. It currently checks alias analyses implemented on the LLVM framework. We have used it to find 29 bugs in two popular alias analysis implementations: Data Structure Alias Analysis(ds-aa) and Andersen's Alias Analysis (anders-aa).

Effective Dynamic Detection of Alias Analysis Errors. In Proc. ESEC/FSE 2013.

To build NeonGoby, you need to have a C++ compiler (e.g., g++ or clang) installed. It should compile without trouble on most recent Linux or MacXOS machines.

1. Download the source code of LLVM 3.0/3.1 and clang 3.0/3.1 from LLVM Download Page. Other version of LLVM and clang are not guaranteed to work with NeonGoby.

2. Build LLVM and clang from source code.

cd <llvm-source-code-root>
mv <clang-source-code-root> tools/clang
./configure --enable-assertions --prefix=<where-you-want-to-install-LLVM>
make [-j] install

3. Add LLVM's install directory to PATH, so that you can run LLVM commands (e.g., llvm-config) everywhere.

4. Checkout NeonGoby's source code

5. Build NeonGoby

git submodule init
git submodule update
./configure --prefix=`llvm-config --prefix`
make
make install

Given a test program and a test workload, NeonGoby dynamically observes the pointer addresses in the test program, and then checks these addresses against an alias analysis for errors.

NeonGoby provides two modes to check an alias analysis: the offline mode and the online mode. The offline mode checks more thoroughly, whereas the online mode checks only intraprocedural alias queries. However, the offline mode has to log information to disk, and on-disk logging can be costly. In contract, the online mode embeds checks into the program, and does not require logging.

Offline Mode

To check an alias analysis (say buggyaa) with a test program (say example.cpp) using the offline mode of NeonGoby, first compile the code into example.bc in LLVM’s intermediate representation (IR), and run the following three commands:

ng_hook_mem.py --hook-all example
./example.inst
ng_check_aa.py --check-all example.bc <log-file> buggyaa

The first command instruments the program for checking, and outputs the instrumented executable as example.inst. The second command runs the instrumented program, which logs information to /tmp/ng-<date>-<time>/pts-<pid>. You can change the location by specifying environment variable LOG_DIR. The third command checks this log against buggyaa for errors.

Our scripts currently work with all the builtin alias analyses in LLVM (e.g., basicaa and scev-aa), and some third-party alias analyses (e.g., anders-aa and ds-aa). To check more third-party alias analyses, you need to build the alias analysis as an LLVM loadable module (a .so file), and manually add extra configuration in tools/ng_utils.py.

Online Mode

To check buggyaa with this test program using the online mode of NeonGoby, run the following commands:

ng_insert_alias_checker.py --action-if-missed=report example buggyaa
./example.ac

The first command inserts alias checks into the test program. The second command runs the program instrumented with alias checks, and reports missing aliases to /tmp/report-<pid>. If you want the program to abort at the first missing alias, change --action-if-missed=report to --action-if-missed=abort in the first command.

Dumping Logs

Use ng_dump_log to dump .pts files to a readable format.

ng_dump_log -log-file <log-file>

See table 2 in our paper Effective Dynamic Detection of Alias Analysis Errors for the bugs we found so far using NeonGoby.

We fixed all the 13 bugs we found in anders-aa; we included the patches in the bugs folder. We reported 8 bugs to ds-aa developers, and 4 of them have been confirmed and fixed.

Fixed bugs in ds-aa:

• #12744
• #12786
• #14147
• #14190

Reported bugs in ds-aa:

• #14075
• #14179
• #14401
• #14496

• Jingyue Wu
• Gang Hu
• Yang Tang
• Junyang Lu
• Junfeng Yang