Tag-Protector: An Effective and Dynamic Detection of Out-of-bound Memory Accesses

Ahmed Saeed, Ali Ahmadinia, Mike Just

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

4 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Programming languages permitting immediate memory accesses through pointers often result in applications having memory-related errors, which may lead to unpredictable failures and security vulnerabilities. A light-weight solution is presented in this paper to tackle such illegal memory accesses dynamically in C/C++ based applications. We propose a new and effective method of instrumenting an application's source code at compile time in order to detect out-of-bound memory accesses. It is based on creating tags, to be coupled with each memory allocation and then placing additional tag checking instructions for each access made to the memory. The proposed solution is evaluated by instrumenting applications from the BugBench benchmark suite and publicly available benchmark software, Runtime Intrusion Prevention Evaluator (RIPE), detecting all the bugs successfully. The performance and memory overhead is further analysed by instrumenting and executing real world applications.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the Third Workshop on Cryptography and Security in Computing Systems
Subtitle of host publicationCS2 '16
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages31-36
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-4503-4065-6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2016
EventThird Workshop on Cryptography and Security in Computing Systems - Prague, United Kingdom
Duration: 20 Jan 2016 → …

Conference

ConferenceThird Workshop on Cryptography and Security in Computing Systems
Abbreviated titleCS2 '16
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityPrague
Period20/01/16 → …

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