DirtyPad is a proof-of-concept tool which tries to provoke errors on read overflows in structure fields (something that existing tools e.g. AddressSanitizer are not capable of).

The idea is to fill struct pads with garbage whenever structure is created (in static memory, on stack or in dynamic memory). This would cause read overflows to return garbage (rather than usual zero) and hopefully cause crashes.

How to build

To build in Ubuntu, install llvm and make as usual. To test, run make check.

How to run

Add -Xclang -load -Xclang path/to/DirtyPad.so to CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS. Or alternatively, set CC and CXX to wrappers in scripts/ folder.

Results

Tbd. Currently I mainly see this failing in packages which do memcmp on structs (e.g. libsndfile) which is a bad but not-so-critical coding practice.