Efficient Software-Based Fault Isolation

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Efficient Software-Based Fault Isolation (1993)

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by Robert Wahbe , Steven Lucco , Thomas E. Anderson , Susan L. Graham

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776 - 12 self

BibTeX

@MISC{Wahbe93efficientsoftware-based,
    author = {Robert Wahbe and Steven Lucco and Thomas E. Anderson and Susan L. Graham},
    title = { Efficient Software-Based Fault Isolation},
    year = {1993}
}

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Abstract

One way to provide fault isolation among cooperating software modules is to place each in its own address space. However, for tightly-coupled modules, this solution incurs prohibitive context switch overhead, In this paper, we present a software approach to implementing fault isolation within a single address space. Our approach has two parts. First, we load the code and data for a distrusted module into its own fault do-main, a logically separate portion of the application’s address space. Second, we modify the object code of a distrusted module to prevent it from writing or jumping to an address outside its fault domain. Both these software operations are portable and programming language independent. Our approach poses a tradeoff relative to hardware fault isolation: substantially faster communication between fault domains, at a cost of slightly increased execution time for distrusted modules. We demonstrate that for frequently communicating modules, implementing fault isolation in software rather than hard-ware can substantially improve end-to-end application performance.

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