Efficient detection of all pointer and array access errors
PLDI '94 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1994 conference on Programming language design and implementation
Static detection of dynamic memory errors
PLDI '96 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1996 conference on Programming language design and implementation
Low-cost, concurrent checking of pointer and array accesses in C programs
Software—Practice & Experience
MediaBench: a tool for evaluating and synthesizing multimedia and communicatons systems
MICRO 30 Proceedings of the 30th annual ACM/IEEE international symposium on Microarchitecture
A static analyzer for finding dynamic programming errors
Software—Practice & Experience
ATEC '02 Proceedings of the General Track of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
CSSV: towards a realistic tool for statically detecting all buffer overflows in C
PLDI '03 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2003 conference on Programming language design and implementation
PLDI '03 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2003 conference on Programming language design and implementation
ARCHER: using symbolic, path-sensitive analysis to detect memory access errors
Proceedings of the 9th European software engineering conference held jointly with 11th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering
Security as a new dimension in embedded system design
Proceedings of the 41st annual Design Automation Conference
Secure Embedded Processing through Hardware-Assisted Run-Time Monitoring
Proceedings of the conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe - Volume 1
CCured: type-safe retrofitting of legacy software
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
Anomalous path detection with hardware support
Proceedings of the 2005 international conference on Compilers, architectures and synthesis for embedded systems
Micro embedded monitoring for security in application specific instruction-set processors
Proceedings of the 2005 international conference on Compilers, architectures and synthesis for embedded systems
MiBench: A free, commercially representative embedded benchmark suite
WWC '01 Proceedings of the Workload Characterization, 2001. WWC-4. 2001 IEEE International Workshop
StackGuard: automatic adaptive detection and prevention of buffer-overflow attacks
SSYM'98 Proceedings of the 7th conference on USENIX Security Symposium - Volume 7
A system for coarse grained memory protection in tiny embedded processors
Proceedings of the 44th annual Design Automation Conference
Ensuring secure program execution in multiprocessor embedded systems: a case study
CODES+ISSS '07 Proceedings of the 5th IEEE/ACM international conference on Hardware/software codesign and system synthesis
Hardbound: architectural support for spatial safety of the C programming language
Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
A multithreading embedded architecture
DNCOCO'08 Proceedings of the 7th conference on Data networks, communications, computers
MemMON: run-time off-chip detection for memory access violation in embedded systems
Proceedings of the 2010 Symposium on Information and Communication Technology
Architectural support for low overhead detection of memory violations
Proceedings of the Conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe
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The lack of memory safety in many popular programming languages, including C and C++, has been a cause for great concern in the realm of software reliability, verification, and more recently, system security. A major portion of known security attacks against software systems can be attributed to this shortcoming, including the well-known stack overflow, heap overflow, and format string attacks. Despite their limitations, the flexibility, performance, and ease of use of these languages have made them the choice of most embedded software developers. Researchers have proposed various techniques to enhance programs for memory safety; however, they are all subject to severe performance penalties, making their use impractical in most scenarios. In this paper, we present architectural enhancements to enable efficient, memory-safe execution of software on embedded processors. The key insight behind our approach is to extend embedded processors with hardware that significantly accelerates the execution of the additional computations involved in memory-safe execution. Specifically, we design custom instructions to perform various kinds of memory-safety checks and augment the instruction set of a state-of-the-art extensible processor (Xtensa from Tensilica, Inc.) to implement them. We demonstrate the application of the proposed architectural enhancements using CCured, an existing tool for type-safe retrofitting of C programs. The tool uses a type-inferencing engine that is built around strong type-safety theory and is provably safe. Simulations of memory-safe versions of popular embedded benchmarks on a cycle-accurate simulator modeling a typical embedded system configuration indicate an average performance improvement of 2.3x, and a maximum of 4.6x when using the proposed architecture. These enhancements entail minimal (less than 10%) hardware overhead to the base processor. Our approach is completely automated, and applicable to any C program, making it a promising and practical approach for addressing the growing security and reliability concerns in embedded software.