Architectural support for low overhead detection of memory violations

  • Authors:

  • Saugata Ghose;Latoya Gilgeous;Polina Dudnik;Aneesh Aggarwal;Corey Waxman

  • Affiliations:

  • State University of New York, Binghamton, NY;State University of New York, Binghamton, NY;State University of New York, Binghamton, NY;State University of New York, Binghamton, NY;State University of New York, Binghamton, NY

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the Conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Violations in memory references cause tremendous loss of productivity, catastrophic mission failures, loss of privacy and security, and much more. Software mechanisms to detect memory violations have high false positive and negative rates or huge performance overhead. This paper proposes architectural support to detect memory reference violations in inherently unsafe languages such as C and C++. In this approach, the ISA is extended to include "safety" instructions that provide compile-time information on pointers and objects. The microarchitecture is extended to efficiently execute the safety instructions. We explore optimizations, such as delayed violation detection and stack-based handling of local pointers, to reduce the performance overhead. Our experiments show that the synergy between hardware and software results in this approach having less than 5% average performance over-head, while an exclusively software mechanism incurs 480% impact for the same benchmarks.