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WatchdogLite: Hardware-Accelerated Compiler-Based Pointer Checking
| Citations: | 4 - 0 self |
BibTeX
@MISC{Nagarakatte_watchdoglite:hardware-accelerated,
author = {Santosh Nagarakatte and Milo M. K. Martin and Steve Zdancewic},
title = {WatchdogLite: Hardware-Accelerated Compiler-Based Pointer Checking},
year = {}
}
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Abstract
Lack of memory safety in C is the root cause of a multitude of seri-ous bugs and security vulnerabilities. Numerous software-only and hardware-based schemes have been proposed to enforce memory safety. Among these approaches, pointer-based checking, which maintains per-pointer metadata in a disjoint metadata space, has been recognized as providing comprehensive memory safety. Soft-ware approaches for pointer-based checking have high performance overheads. In contrast, hardware approaches introduce a myriad of hardware structures and widgets to mitigate those performance overheads. This paper proposes WatchdogLite, an ISA extension that pro-vides hardware acceleration for a compiler implementation of pointer-based checking. This division of labor between the com-piler and the hardware allows for hardware acceleration while us-ing only preexisting architectural registers. By leveraging the com-piler to identify pointers, perform check elimination, and insert the new instructions, this approach attains performance similar to prior hardware-intensive approaches without adding any hardware structures for tracking metadata.
Keyphrases
pointer-based checking hardware-accelerated compiler-based pointer checking memory safety security vulnerability hardware-based scheme disjoint metadata space high performance overhead per-pointer metadata check elimination root cause hardware structure hardware acceleration new instruction comprehensive memory safety isa extension soft-ware approach seri-ous bug hardware-intensive approach pro-vides hardware acceleration hardware approach architectural register compiler implementation
