Backward-compatible constant-time exception-protected memory

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Backward-compatible constant-time exception-protected memory

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Foundations of Software Engineering archive
Proceedings of the 7th joint meeting of the European software engineering conference and the ACM SIGSOFT symposium on The foundations of software engineering on European software engineering conference and foundations of software engineering symposium table of contents

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

SESSION: Dependability table of contents

Pages 71-80

Year of Publication: 2009

ISBN:978-1-60558-001-2

Authors

Pradeep Varma	IBM India Research Laboratory, New Delhi, India
Rudrapatna K. Shyamasundar	Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India
Harshit J. Shah	Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India

Sponsors

ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering

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ACM New York, NY, USA

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ABSTRACT

We present a novel, table-free technique for detecting all temporal and spatial memory access errors (e.g. dangling pointers, out-of-bounds check, etc.) in programs supporting general pointers. Our approach is the first technique to provide such error checking using only constant-time operations. The scheme relies on fat pointers, whose size is contained within standard scalar sizes (up to two words) so that atomic hardware support for operations upon the pointers is obtained along with meaningful casts in-between pointers and other scalars. Optimized compilation of code becomes possible since the scalarized-for-free encoded pointers get register allocated and manipulated. Backward compatibility is enabled by the scalar pointer sizes, with novel automatic support provided for encoding and decoding of fat pointers in place for interaction with unprotected code (e.g. library binaries). Implementation and benchmarks of the technique over several applications of the memory-intensive Olden suite indicate that the average time overhead of our method is about half the time cost of an unprotected application's execution (< 55%). This performance is over twice faster than the nearest prior work.

REFERENCES

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