Detect Go’s silent arithmetic bugs with go-panikint

[carlospolop]

🤖 Automated Content Update

This PR was automatically generated by the HackTricks News Bot based on a technical blog post.

📝 Source Information

• Blog URL: https://blog.trailofbits.com/2025/12/31/detect-gos-silent-arithmetic-bugs-with-go-panikint/
• Blog Title: Detect Go’s silent arithmetic bugs with go-panikint
• Suggested Section: Reversing / Fuzzing & Vulnerability Discovery (AI Security section contains fuzzing topics, but best fit is a general Fuzzing/secure-dev tooling page) or Binary Exploitation -> Integer Overflow (add a subsection: 'Go integer overflow detection with instrumented toolchains (go-panikint)')

🎯 Content Summary

Trail of Bits presents go-panikint (GitHub: https://github.com/trailofbits/go-panikint), a modified/forked Go toolchain that turns Go’s normally-silent integer wrap-around behavior into explicit runtime panics. The goal is to make arithmetic bugs (especially security-relevant ones) observable to fuzzers and tests as crashes with stack traces and reproducible inputs, instead of silently producing incorrect results.

Why this matters: Go’s standard integer arithmetic wraps on overflow with no exce...

🔧 Technical Details

Technique: make arithmetic logic bugs fuzzable by replacing the language toolchain with an instrumented compiler that inserts runtime overflow checks at a low-level IR/SSA stage. This converts silent integer wrap-around into deterministic crashes (panics), which fuzzers can detect and minimize into stable repro cases.

Noise control: provide suppression for intentional wrap-around, commonly via path-based allowlists/denylists and per-operation annotations (e.g., // overflow_false_positive, // truncation_false_positive).

Bug patterns to hunt: user-controlled arithmetic used for indexing, pagination, quotas, sizes, and access-control decisions (e.g., end := Offset + Limit on uint64), where wrap-around can invalidate boundary checks and produce incorrect security-relevant behavior.

🤖 Agent Actions

Updated binary-exploitation/integer-overflow-and-underflow.md with a new section on detecting Go integer overflows using the go-panikint instrumented toolchain, including motivation, build/usage steps, noise-suppression options, and a real-world pagination overflow pattern, and added references to the Trail of Bits blog and tool repository.

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[carlospolop]

🔗 Additional Context

Original Blog Post: https://blog.trailofbits.com/2025/12/31/detect-gos-silent-arithmetic-bugs-with-go-panikint/

Content Categories: Based on the analysis, this content was categorized under "Reversing / Fuzzing & Vulnerability Discovery (AI Security section contains fuzzing topics, but best fit is a general Fuzzing/secure-dev tooling page) or Binary Exploitation -> Integer Overflow (add a subsection: 'Go integer overflow detection with instrumented toolchains (go-panikint)')".

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