Serialization Sanitizer

This project uses a combination of compile-time code generation with a Clang frontend tooling pass and a runtime sanitizer to discover missing members during serialization of classes.

The Clang frontend pass traverses all classes included in a C++ file that have a serialize method. The compile-time pass then generates code (either by modifying the source code or tacking on partial specializations) that traverse all members discovered by the compile-time traversal.

At runtime, if sanitizer partial specializations exist for a class, the sanitizer will check the memory addresses of the members traversed by the user against the ones the compiler found. After a program runs, the sanitizer will output the class members that were not traversed by the serializer as they may indicate an error.

Building

• Get docker and docker-compose. Then, to build cd into the repository directory after cloning from git.

• Optional: by default, the sanitizer will build with clang-5.0 based on the variables set in .env. This can be modified by exporting an environment variable COMPILER before running docker-compose commands.

export COMPILER=clang-7

• Build the latest VT develop image with the selected Clang compiler. If that image as been uploaded it may be alternatively fetched from Docker Hub.

docker-compose build vt-base

• Optional: fetch the sanitizer base image (Clang frontend tooling and associated dependencies) if the clang compiler version exists. If it doesn't exist for your preferred version, build it yourself (next step).

docker-compose pull sanitizer-base

• Bring images up on docker-compose (will build base sanitizer image if needed):

docker-compose up

• Compile and build the latest sanitizer code:

docker-compose run sanitizer-base

• Launch the VT container interactively with the sanitizer built:

docker-compose run vt-base /bin/bash

Running

Once the sanitizer binary is built, it can be run on a C++ file with a JSON compilation database so it knows how to compile the C++ file (includes, flags, etc).

# /serialization-sanitizer/sanitizer /build/vt/compile-comands.json /vt/examples/hello_world.cc

A compilation database can be generated for a cmake project by defining a cmake variable for that project. Set -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=1 while configuring the project that is going to be sanitized. When that variable is set, the JSON compilation database will be generated in the cmake build directory with the file name compile_commands.json.

Command template

./sanitizer -p <json-compilation-database> <cc-file> -extra-arg=-std=c++1y