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Safemem: Exploiting ECC-memory for detecting memory leaks and memory corruption during production runs (2005)
| Venue: | In Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture |
| Citations: | 85 - 12 self |
BibTeX
@INPROCEEDINGS{Qin05safemem:exploiting,
author = {Feng Qin and Shan Lu and Yuanyuan Zhou},
title = {Safemem: Exploiting ECC-memory for detecting memory leaks and memory corruption during production runs},
booktitle = {In Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture},
year = {2005}
}
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Abstract
Memory leaks and memory corruption are two major forms of software bugs that severely threaten system availability and security. According to the US-CERT Vulnerability Notes Database, 68 % of all reported vulnerabilities in 2003 were caused by memory leaks or memory corruption. Dynamic monitoring tools, such as the state-of-the-art Purify, are commonly used to detect memory leaks and memory corruption. However, most of these tools suffer from high overhead, with up to a 20 times slowdown, making them infeasible to be used for production-runs. This paper proposes a tool called SafeMem to detect memory leaks and memory corruption on-the-fly during production-runs. This tool does not rely on any new hardware support. Instead, it makes a novel use of existing ECC memory technology and exploits intelligent dynamic memory usage behavior analysis to detect memory leaks and corruption. We have evaluated SafeMem with seven real-world applications that contain memory leak or memory corruption bugs. SafeMem detects all tested bugs with low overhead (only 1.6%-14.4%), 2-3 orders of magnitudes smaller than Purify. Our results also show that ECCprotection is effective in pruning false positives for memory leak detection, and in reducing the amount of memory waste (by a factor of 64-74) used for memory monitoring in memory corruption detection compared to page-protection. 1
Keyphrases
memory leak memory corruption production run exploiting ecc-memory novel use memory waste memory corruption bug new hardware support dynamic monitoring tool memory monitoring state-of-the-art purify low overhead 2-3 order us-cert vulnerability note database high overhead memory leak detection time slowdown major form false positive memory corruption detection ecc memory technology real-world application software bug system availability
