QASan (QEMU-AddressSanitizer)

Written and maintaned by Andrea Fioraldi andreafioraldi@gmail.com

QASan is a custom QEMU 3.1.1 that detects memory errors in the guest using clang's AddressSanitizer.

Build

Tested only on Ubuntu 18.04 with clang-8 installed.

You need the lief python3 package.

Build using the build.py script specifying the path to the ASan DSO.

./build.py --asan-dso /path/to/libclang_rt.asan-ARCH.so

On Ubuntu 18.04, the path is /usr/lib/llvm-8/lib/clang/8.0.0/lib/linux/libclang_rt.asan-x86_64.so

Other available options are:

• --arch to specify the target architecture (default is x86_64)
• --cc and --cxx to specify C and C++ compilers (default clang-8)
• --cross to specify the cross C compiler for libqasan
• --clean to clean builded files

ATM, the supported architectures are x86, x86_64, arm and arm64.

Note that the ASan DSO architecture must be coherent with the bits of the target arch (with x86 and ARM you need libclang_rt.asan-i386.so).

Usage

To simply run a binary under QASan:

./qasan ./program args...

To get a verbose debug output of the hooked actions:

./qasan --verbose ./program args...

Note that QASan will not output meaningful stacktraces or error reports.

The reported errors show informaton about the QEMU host and so they are not useful for debugging, I suggest to use Valgrind instead.

As the main use case is fuzzing and the advantage over other binary-level memory checkers is the speed, they are not really needed.

Fuzzing

To fuzz a binary with QASan and AFL++ use a command similar to the following:

~/AFLplusplus/afl-fuzz -U -i in -o out -m none -- python3 ~/qasan/qasan ./program

It supports all the AFL++ QEMU configurations, AFL_COMPCOV_LEVEL=2 is higly suggested.

FAQ

When I should use QASan?

If your target binary is PIC x86_64, you should before give a try to retrowrite for static rewriting.

If it fails, or if your binary is for another architecture, QASan is the tool that you want/have to use.

Note that the overhead of AFL++ libdislocator is much lower but it can catch less bugs. This is a short blanket, take your choice.

Another discriminat for the choice is CompareCoverage. If your target has fuzzing roadblocks, you can use QASan+CompCov to fuzz it with Sanitization and Roadblocks bypassing.

QEMU segfaults with big endian archs

See https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1701798, use the workaround described here.

MIPS doesn't work!

There are issues with the compatibility of the address spaces between MIPS and x86 ASan.

Performance

Native (slowdown: 1x):

$ time /usr/bin/objdump -g -x /usr/bin/objdump
...
real	0m0,058s
user	0m0,010s
sys	0m0,029s

QEMU (slowdown: 2.4x):

$ time qemu-x86_64 /usr/bin/objdump -g -x /usr/bin/objdump
...
real	0m0,141s
user	0m0,096s
sys	0m0,020s

QASan (slowdown: 3.6x):

$ time ./qasan /usr/bin/objdump -g -x /usr/bin/objdump
...
real	0m0,209s
user	0m0,120s
sys	0m0,032s

Valgrind (slowdown: 17.4x):

$ time valgrind /usr/bin/objdump -g -x /usr/bin/objdump
...
real	0m1,009s
user	0m0,921s
sys	0m0,076s