The widespread deployment of exploit mitigations such as CFI and shadow stacks are making code-reuse attacks increasingly difficult. This has forced adversaries to consider data-only attacks against which the venerable ASLR remains the primary deployed defense.Data-Space Randomization (DSR) techniques raise the bar against data-only attacks by making it harder for adversaries to inject malicious data flows into vulnerable applications. DSR works by masking memory load and store instructions. Masks are chosen (i) to not interfere with intended data flows and (ii) such that masking likely interferes with unintended flows introduced by malicious program inputs.

Binary lifting and recompilation allow a wide range of install-time program transformations, such as security hardening, deobfuscation, and reoptimization. Existing binary lifting tools are based on static disassembly and thus have to rely on heuristics to disassemble binaries.

The C and C++ programming languages are notoriously insecure yet remain indispensable. Developers therefore resort to a multi-pronged approach to find security issues before adversaries. These include manual, static, and dynamic program analysis. Dynamic bug finding tools-henceforth "sanitizers"-can find bugs that elude other types of analysis because they observe the actual execution of a program, and can therefore directly observe incorrect program behavior as it happens. A vast number of sanitizers have been prototyped by academics and refined by practitioners. We provide a systematic overview of sanitizers with an emphasis on their role in finding security issues. Specifically, we taxonomize the available tools and the security vulnerabilities they cover, describe their performance and compatibility properties, and highlight various trade-offs.