Abstract: Memory safety issues,such as buffer overflow,have long troubled C language developers.Runtime detection is a reliable solution to C language memory safety problems,but it introduces significant runtime overhead.Existing methods to reduce runtime overhead for memory safety detection may be incompatible with existing code,depend on manual annotations,introduce false negatives and positives,or fail to ensure timing consistency between illegal memory access and error reporting.This paper proposes a lightweight runtime detection method for stack memory regions,which combines static analysis to replace certain runtime metadata lookups with compile-time metadata checks,and replaces most high-overhead detection function calls with inline Boolean condition checks.The method also uses on-demand interprocedural alias analysis to extend detection to interprocedural and whole-program analysis.A prototype tool,LISA(Lightweight Inline Safety Assertion),was implemented with static analysis and detection code instrumentation based on the C language abstract syntax tree.Experiments show that LISA reduces runtime detection overhead by an average of 36%,with only about 0.5% additional space overhead.Furthermore,LISA addresses compatibility with existing code,enhances runtime detection effectiveness,and ensures real-time memory safety,overcoming limitations of previous methods.

Key words: Memory safety, Runtime verification, Static analysis, Source level instrumentation, Alias analysis