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HardBound: Architectural Support for Spatial Safety of the C Programming Language (2008)
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@MISC{Devietti08hardbound:architectural,
author = {Joe Devietti and Colin Blundell and et al.},
title = { HardBound: Architectural Support for Spatial Safety of the C Programming Language},
year = {2008}
}
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Abstract
The C programming language is at least as well known for its absence of spatial memory safety guarantees (i.e., lack of bounds checking) as it is for its high performance. C’s unchecked pointer arithmetic and array indexing allow simple programming mistakes to lead to erroneous executions, silent data corruption, and security vulnerabilities. Many prior proposals have tackled enforcing spatial safety in C programs by checking pointer and array accesses. However, existing software-only proposals have significant drawbacks that may prevent wide adoption, including: unacceptably high runtime overheads, lack of completeness, incompatible pointer representations, or need for non-trivial changes to existing C source code and compiler infrastructure. Inspired by the promise of these software-only approaches, this paper proposes a hardware bounded pointer architectural primitive that supports cooperative hardware/software enforcement of spatial memory safety for C programs. This bounded pointer is a new hardware primitive datatype for pointers that leaves the standard C pointer representation intact, but augments it with bounds information maintained separately and invisibly by the hardware. The bounds are initialized by the software, and they are then propagated and enforced transparently by the hardware, which automatically checks a pointer’s bounds before it is dereferenced. One mode of use requires instrumenting only malloc, which enables enforcement of per-allocation spatial safety for heap-allocated objects for existing binaries. When combined with simple intra-procedural compiler instrumentation, hardware bounded pointers enable a lowoverhead approach for enforcing complete spatial memory safety in unmodified C programs.
Keyphrases
spatial safety programming language architectural support spatial memory safety many prior proposal spatial memory safety guarantee high runtime overhead significant drawback security vulnerability silent data corruption bound information high performance lowoverhead approach allow simple programming mistake source code compiler infrastructure erroneous execution wide adoption cooperative hardware software enforcement complete spatial memory safety software-only approach heap-allocated object non-trivial change software-only proposal per-allocation spatial safety unmodified program architectural primitive array access standard pointer representation new hardware primitive datatype simple intra-procedural compiler instrumentation incompatible pointer representation bounded pointer
