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Address Sanitizer example

When developing for Android, Google have a number of tools available to help debug memory issues in C/C++ code. The approach recommended by Google is to use ASan, however the ASan documentation is currently (March ‘22, Android Studio 2021.1.1, Gradle 7, APIs 27+) missing crucial information to enable developers to debug these issues. This example project demonstrates using ASan to debug a memory issue.

Instructions to modify from a stock Android project with CMake:

  1. Run the sanitize-setup-script in the root of this project (copy to your own project, change the ndk version if required, and run)

  2. In your CMakeLists.txt, add the following (replacing ${TARGET} as required with the name of your target):

     if(SANITIZE)
     target_compile_options(${TARGET} PUBLIC -fsanitize=address -fno-omit-frame-pointer)
     set_target_properties(${TARGET} PROPERTIES LINK_FLAGS -fsanitize=address)
 endif()

  3. In your app's build.gradle, to your android.buildTypes closure, add:

    sanitize {
    initWith debug
    externalNativeBuild {
        cmake {
            arguments "-DANDROID_STL=c++_shared", "-DSANITIZE=TRUE"
        }
    }
}

  4. Sync Gradle and switch your active variant to "sanitize" in the "Build Variants" tab (bottom left)

  5. Debug your App and reproduce the issue. You should see output from address sanitizer (filter by "wrap.sh"). In the stack traces you will see lines like:

    #1 0x5e2cdaf76c  (/data/app/~~lTqqcXu2okmchd_nMeTm7w==/io.nrbtech.asanexample-spc73OiysYUjJ2984-N4kw==/lib/arm64/libasanexample.so+0x76c)

    Where libasanexample.so is the name of the compiled C library and 0x76c represents the offset into the library the stack trace is pointing to.

  6. Copy the symbolizer script in the root of this project to your own and modify for your C library name. You can then run this script like so:

    % ./symbolizer -a arm64-v8a 0x76c
Java_io_nrbtech_asanexample_Test_test
/Users/nick/Documents/Repos/ASanExample/app/src/main/cpp/test.c:7:5

    The output contains the path to the line of code pointed to by the stack trace, enabling you to find where the issue occurred and figure out the problem. In this case, it points to the line where we free'd the pointer for the second time.