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<title>Dalvik Bytecode Verifier Notes</title>
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<h1>Dalvik Bytecode Verifier Notes</h1>
<p>
The bytecode verifier in the Dalvik VM attempts to provide the same sorts
of checks and guarantees that other popular virtual machines do. We
perform generally the same set of checks as are described in _The Java
Virtual Machine Specification, Second Edition_, including the updates
planned for the Third Edition.
<p>
Verification can be enabled for all classes, disabled for all, or enabled
only for "remote" (non-bootstrap) classes. It should be performed for any
class that will be processed with the DEX optimizer, and in fact the
default VM behavior is to only optimize verified classes.
<h2>Why Verify?</h2>
<p>
The verification process adds additional time to the build and to
the installation of new applications. It's fairly quick for app-sized
DEX files, but rather slow for the big "core" and "framework" files.
Why do it all, when our system relies on UNIX processes for security?
<p>
<ol>
<li>Optimizations. The interpreter can ignore a lot of potential
error cases because the verifier guarantees that they are impossible.
Also, we can optimize the DEX file more aggressively if we start
with a stronger set of assumptions about the bytecode.
<li>"Exact" GC. The work peformed during verification has significant
overlap with the work required to compute register use maps for exact
GC. Improper register use, caught by the verifier, could lead to
subtle problems with an "exact" GC.
<li>Intra-application security. If an app wants to download bits
of interpreted code over the network and execute them, it can safely
do so using well-established security mechanisms.
<li>3rd party app failure analysis. We have no way to control the
tools and post-processing utilities that external developers employ,
so when we get bug reports with a weird exception or native crash
it's very helpful to start with the assumption that the bytecode
is valid.
</ol>
<h2>Verifier Differences</h2>
<p>
There are a few checks that the Dalvik bytecode verifier does not perform,
because they're not relevant. For example:
<ul>
<li>Type restrictions on constant pool references are not enforced,
because Dalvik does not have a pool of typed constants. (Dalvik
uses a simple index into type-specific pools.)
<li>Verification of the operand stack size is not performed, because
Dalvik does not have an operand stack.
<li>Limitations on <code>jsr</code> and <code>ret</code> do not apply,
because Dalvik doesn't support subroutines.
</ul>
In some cases they are implemented differently, e.g.:
<ul>
<li>In a conventional VM, backward branches and exceptions are
forbidden when a local variable holds an uninitialized reference. The
restriction was changed to mark registers as invalid when they hold
references to the uninitialized result of a previous invocation of the
same <code>new-instance</code> instruction.
This solves the same problem -- trickery potentially allowing
uninitialized objects to slip past the verifier -- without unduly
limiting branches.
</ul>
There are also some new ones, such as:
<ul>
<li>The <code>move-exception</code> instruction can only appear as
the first instruction in an exception handler.
<li>The <code>move-result*</code> instructions can only appear
immediately after an appropriate <code>invoke-*</code>
or <code>filled-new-array</code> instruction.
</ul>
<p>
The Dalvik verifier is more restrictive than other VMs in one area:
type safety on sub-32-bit integer widths. These additional restrictions
should make it impossible to, say, pass a value outside the range
[-128, 127] to a function that takes a <code>byte</code> as an argument.
<h2>Verification Failures</h2>
<p>
When the verifier rejects a class, it always throws a VerifyError.
This is different in some cases from other implementations. For example,
if a class attempts to perform an illegal access on a field, the expected
behavior is to receive an IllegalAccessError at runtime the first time
the field is actually accessed. The Dalvik verifier will reject the
entire class immediately.
<p>
It's difficult to throw the error on first use in Dalvik. Possible ways
to implement this behavior include:
<ol>
<li>We could replace the invalid field access instruction with a special
instruction that generates an illegal access error, and allow class
verification to complete successfully. This type of verification must
often be deferred to first class load, rather than be performed ahead of time
during DEX optimization, which means the bytecode instructions will be
mapped read-only during verification. So this won't work.
</li>
<li>We can perform the access checks when the field/method/class is
resolved. In a typical VM implementation we would do the check when the
entry is resolved in the context of the current classfile, but our DEX
files combine multiple classfiles together, merging the field/method/class
resolution results into a single large table. Once one class successfully
resolves the field, every other class in the same DEX file would be able
to access the field. This is bad.
</li>
<li>Perform the access checks on every field/method/class access.
This adds significant overhead. This is mitigated somewhat by the DEX
optimizer, which will convert many field/method/class accesses into a
simpler form after performing the access check. However, not all accesses
can be optimized (e.g. accesses to classes unknown at dexopt time),
and we don't currently have an optimized form of certain instructions
(notably static field operations).
</li>
</ol>
<p>
Other implementations are possible, but they all involve allocating
some amount of additional memory or spending additional cycles
on non-DEX-optimized instructions. We don't want to throw an
IllegalAccessError at verification time, since that would indicate that
access to the class being verified was illegal.
<p>
One approach that might be worth pursuing: for situations like illegal
accesses, the verifier makes an in-RAM private copy of the method, and
alters the instructions there. The class object is altered to point at
the new copy of the instructions. This requires minimal memory overhead
and provides a better experience for developers.
<p>
The VerifyError is accompanied by detailed, if somewhat cryptic,
information in the log file. From this it's possible to determine the
exact instruction that failed, and the reason for the failure. We can
also constructor the VerifyError with an IllegalAccessError passed in as
the cause.
<address>Copyright &copy; 2008 The Android Open Source Project</address>
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