Un compilador no sólo genera código ejecutable a partir de nuestros programas escritos en un lenguaje de alto nivel. Tradicionalmente los compiladores han tratado de mejorar el código desarrollado por los programadores para hacerlo más eficiente (sacando partido de las características de la arquitectura en la que se va a ejecutar, los mecanimos de los procesaores, sus recursos…).
Compilers are great at taking your hand crafted human-readable program, translating it into machine code and, in the process, optimizing it so it runs as efficiently as possible
Los investigadores del MIT Xi Wang, Nickolai Zeldovich, M. Frans Kaashoek y Armando Solar-Lezama han presentado un artículo donde se evalúan las consecuencias de seguridad que puede tener la eliminación de código que puede hacer el compilador por ser considerado innecesario.
… research from MIT points out, in their zeal to optimize your code, compilers can go too far and remove code that they shouldn’t, which can make the system or application more vulnerable.
También han desarrollado una herramienta, que nos avisará del código que es susceptible de tener este tipo de problemas, para que lo podamos arreglar:
The good news is the researchers have developed a model and a static checker for identifying unstable code. Their checker is called STACK, and it currently works for checking C/C++ code. The idea is that it will warn programmers about unstable code in their applications, so they can fix it, rather than have the compiler simply leave it out. They also hope it will encourage compiler writers to rethink how they can optimize code in more secure ways.
En Dude, where’s my code? se pueden ver más ideas y algún ejemplo:
A classic example, explains Xi Wang, a graduate student in EECS and first author on the new paper, is the assumption that if a program attempts to store too large a number at a memory location reserved for an integer, the computer will lop off the bits that don’t fit. “In machines, integers have a limit,” Wang says. “Whenever you exceed that limit, the input value basically wraps around to a smaller value.”
Seasoned C programmers will actually exploit this behavior to verify that program inputs don’t exceed some threshold. Rather than writing a line of code that, say, compares the sum of two numbers to the known threshold for an integer (“if a > int_max - b”), they’ll check to see whether the sum of the numbers is smaller than one of the addends (“if a + b < a”) — whether, that is, the summation causes the integer to wrap around to a smaller value.
