Hardware Based Function Level Mandatory Access Control for Memory Structures; Final technical memo. May-Sep 2007

摘要

This report presents the results of the mini-grant research project. It explores a possible explanation on why buffer overflows, format strings and other memory related vulnerabilities are still prevalent today. It is argued that this can be attributed to the required level of user interaction to apply today's solutions. Therefore, the researched solution was a hardware based instruction level mandatory access control mechanism that will be enabled by default whenever a user obtains a new computer with such a processor. It also presents the reasoning behind why instruction level is more desirable than function level access control mechanism, which was the original theory. The design and proof of concept demonstration as well as difficulties in achieving the desired proof are also presented.