================ @@ -0,0 +1,362 @@ +================================================== +``-fbounds-safety``: Enforcing bounds safety for C +================================================== + +.. contents:: + :local: + +Overview +======== + +``-fbounds-safety`` is a C extension to enforce bounds safety to prevent out-of-bounds (OOB) memory accesses, which remain a major source of security vulnerabilities in C. ``-fbounds-safety`` aims to eliminate this class of bugs by turning OOB accesses into deterministic traps. + +The ``-fbounds-safety`` extension offers bounds annotations that programmers can use to attach bounds to pointers. For example, programmers can add the ``__counted_by(N)`` annotation to parameter ``ptr``, indicating that the pointer has ``N`` valid elements: + +.. code-block:: c + + void foo(int *__counted_by(N) ptr, size_t N); + +Using this bounds information, the compiler inserts bounds checks on every pointer dereference, ensuring that the program does not access memory outside the specified bounds. The compiler requires programmers to provide enough bounds information so that the accesses can be checked at either run time or compile time — and it rejects code if it cannot. + +The most important contribution of ``-fbounds-safety`` is how it reduces the programmer’s annotation burden by reconciling bounds annotations at ABI boundaries with the use of implicit wide pointers (a.k.a. “fat” pointers) that carry bounds information on local variables without the need for annotations. We designed this model so that it preserves ABI compatibility with C while minimizing adoption effort. + +The ``-fbounds-safety`` extension has been adopted on millions of lines of production C code and proven to work in a consumer operating system setting. The extension was designed to enable incremental adoption — a key requirement in real-world settings where modifying an entire project and its dependencies all at once is often not possible. It also addresses multiple of other practical challenges that have made existing approaches to safer C dialects difficult to adopt, offering these properties that make it widely adoptable in practice: + +* It is designed to preserve the Application Binary Interface (ABI). +* It interoperates well with plain C code. +* It can be adopted partially and incrementally while still providing safety benefits. +* It is syntactically and semantically compatible with C. +* Consequently, source code that adopts the extension can continue to be compiled by toolchains that do not support the extension. ---------------- rapidsna wrote:
I added a caveat that this still requires inclusion of header to define the bounds annotations to empty. https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/70749 _______________________________________________ cfe-commits mailing list cfe-commits@lists.llvm.org https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cfe-commits
