SafeMem: Exploiting ECC-Memory for Detecting Memory Leaks and Memory Corruption During Production Runs

  • Authors:

  • Feng Qin;Shan Lu;Yuanyuan Zhou

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign;University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign;University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

  • Venue:
  • HPCA '05 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 ECC-protection 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.