This technology is a simple, low-overhead hardware-software framework for debugging and protecting against memory-based attacks and errors.
Memory corruption errors are one of the most pervasive problems in computer security. Current methods to address memory safety concerns commonly involve whitelisting safe memory regions or blacklisting unsafe regions, which offer strong security but are limited by slow operation and/or the need for significant hardware modifications.
This technology describes a simple, low-overhead hardware-software system to enhance memory safety. The software infrastructure is based on a tripwire approach in which legitimate memory regions are segregated from bad regions by blacklisting the bad regions. Because this technology lowers the performance overhead significantly compared to the state-of-the-art software and hardware techniques and is simple to add to existing software, it has the potential to allow for rapid testing of memory safety and protection against future memory-based attacks and errors.
This technology minimizes the performance overheads of memory safety to ~1.02x—1.16x, while providing byte-granular protection and maintaining very low hardware overheads.
IR CU18053
Licensing Contact: Greg Maskel
