Creating an LLVM Sanitizer from Hopes and Dreams

Summary: Trail of Bits wintern Carson Harmon, a Purdue graduate and new full-time research staff member, set out to implement a dynamic points-to analysis in LLVM during the company's month-long winter internship program, which hosted 4 winterns across 3 projects. He did not get far on the analysis because of a lack of documentation on LLVM sanitizers, so he instead wrote a high-level overview of LLVM's compiler driver, pass manager, and compiler-rt runtime and released a tutorial with a prebuilt test sanitizer.
Why it matters: The tooling that catches memory bugs in production code is built on sanitizer infrastructure that, by this account, lacks enough documentation for a new engineer to extend it - a gap that sits directly under the static and dynamic analysis tools developers already rely on.

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