Segment protection for embedded systems using run-time checks

Simpson, Matthew S.; Middha, Bhuvan; Barua, Rajeev

doi:10.1145/1086297.1086307

Cited by 14 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Simpson et al [53] developed a low-overhead method for achieving memory segmentation using compiler-inserted runtime checks. Like paging, segmented virtual memory is a common approach for providing coarse-grained memory protection.…”

Section: Other Methods Of Memory Protectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

MemSafe: Ensuring the Spatial and Temporal Memory Safety of C at Runtime

Simpson

Barua

2010

2010 10th IEEE Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation

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SUMMARYMemory access violations are a leading source of unreliability in C programs. As evidence of this problem, a variety of methods exist that retrofit C with software checks to detect memory errors at runtime. However, these methods generally suffer from one or more drawbacks including the inability to detect all errors, the use of incompatible metadata, the need for manual code modifications, and high runtime overheads. This paper presents a compiler analysis and transformation for ensuring the memory safety of C called MemSafe. MemSafe makes several novel contributions that improve upon previous work and lower the cost of safety. These include (1) a method for modeling temporal errors as spatial errors, (2) a metadata representation that combines features of both object-and pointer-based approaches, and (3) a data-flow representation that simplifies optimizations for removing unneeded checks. MemSafe is capable of detecting real errors with lower overheads than previous efforts. Experimental results show that MemSafe detects all memory errors in six programs with known violations as well as two large and widely-used open source applications. Finally, MemSafe ensures complete safety with an average overhead of 88% on 30 programs commonly used for evaluating the performance of error detection tools.

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Section: Other Methods Of Memory Protectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

MemSafe: Ensuring the Spatial and Temporal Memory Safety of C at Runtime

Simpson

Barua

2010

2010 10th IEEE Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation

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“…Other methods seek to provide minimal memory protection guarantees to programs executed on systems lacking hardware virtual memory. Simpson et al developed a low‐overhead method for achieving memory segmentation using compiler‐inserted runtime checks. Like paging, segmented virtual memory is a common approach for providing coarse‐grained memory protection.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

MemSafe: ensuring the spatial and temporal memory safety of C at runtime

Simpson

Barua

2012

Softw Pract Exp

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SUMMARYMemory access violations are a leading source of unreliability in C programs. As evidence of this problem, a variety of methods exist that retrofit C with software checks to detect memory errors at runtime. However, these methods generally suffer from one or more drawbacks including the inability to detect all errors, the use of incompatible metadata, the need for manual code modifications, and high runtime overheads. This paper presents a compiler analysis and transformation for ensuring the memory safety of C called MemSafe. MemSafe makes several novel contributions that improve upon previous work and lower the cost of safety. These include (i) a method for modeling temporal errors as spatial errors, (ii) a metadata representation that combines features of both object-based and pointer-based approaches, and (iii) a dataflow representation that simplifies optimizations for removing unneeded checks. MemSafe is capable of detecting real errors with lower overheads than previous efforts. Experimental results show that MemSafe detects all memory errors in six programs with known violations as well as two large and widely used open source applications. Finally, MemSafe ensures complete safety with an average overhead of 88% on 30 programs commonly used for evaluating the performance of error detection tools.

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“…We would also like to thank Matthew Simpson, Bhuvan Middha, and Rajeev Barua for sharing a preprint of their inspiring paper on segment protection [Simpson et al 2005] as well as Charles Dowding and Mat Kotowsky for sharing their data [Dowding et al 2005].…”

Section: Acknowledgmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Memmu

Bai¹,

Yang²,

Dick³

2009

ACM Trans. Embed. Comput. Syst.

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Random access memory (RAM) is tightly constrained in the least expensive, lowest-power embedded systems such as sensor network nodes and portable consumer electronics. The most widely used sensor network nodes have only 4 to 10KB of RAM and do not contain memory management units (MMUs). It is difficult to implement complex applications under such tight memory constraints. Nonetheless, price and power-consumption constraints make it unlikely that increases in RAM in these systems will keep pace with the increasing memory requirements of applications.We propose the use of automated compile-time and runtime techniques to increase the amount of usable memory in MMU-less embedded systems. The proposed techniques do not increase hardware cost, and require few or no changes to existing applications. We have developed runtime library routines and compiler transformations to control and optimize the automatic migration of application data between compressed and uncompressed memory regions, as well as a fast compression algorithm well suited to this application. These techniques were experimentally evaluated on Crossbow TelosB sensor network nodes running a number of data-collection and signal-processing applications. Our results indicate that available memory can be increased by up to 50% with less than 10% performance degradation for most benchmarks.

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Segment protection for embedded systems using run-time checks

Cited by 14 publications

References 20 publications

MemSafe: Ensuring the Spatial and Temporal Memory Safety of C at Runtime

MemSafe: Ensuring the Spatial and Temporal Memory Safety of C at Runtime

MemSafe: ensuring the spatial and temporal memory safety of C at runtime

Memmu

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