Despite the recent advances in pre-production bug detection, heap use-after-free and heap-buffer-overflow bugs remain the primary problem for security, reliability, and developer productivity for applications written in C or C++, across all major software ecosystems. Memory-safe languages solve this problem when they are used, but the existing code bases consisting of billions of lines of C and C++ continue to grow, and we need additional bug detection mechanisms.

This paper describes a family of tools that detect these two classes of memory-safety bugs, while running in production, at near-zero overhead. These tools combine page-granular guarded allocation and low rate sampling. In other words, we added an “if” statement to a 36 year old idea and made it work at scale.

We describe the basic algorithm, several of its variations and implementations, and the results of multi-year deployments across mobile, desktop, and server applications.