Low Overhead Software/Hardware Mechanisms for Software Assurance and Producibility

摘要

Memory related software vulnerabilities such as buffer overflow and dangling pointers make computer systems vulnerable to exploits and cost the US economy huge sums of money. Software tools proposed so far to address these vulnerabilities are limited in their applicability because they either have low detection rate and high false alarm rate or have a huge performance overhead. This report explores a new initiative to develop low overhead integrated hardware/software mechanisms to detect memory related vulnerabilities. These mechanisms are expected to resolve the limitations of software approaches by using specialized hardware for detecting the vulnerabilities, thus tremendously facilitating software assurance and producibility.