Error checking with pointer variables

Zelkowitz, Marvin V.; McMullin, Paul R.; Merkel, Keith R.; Larsen, Howard J.

doi:10.1145/800191.805623

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Early work [16,18,26,38,41] in the pointer-based approach associated bounds information with each pointer by modifying the pointer representation into what is typically called a fat pointer. While convenient, the major downside of this approach is the incompatibility between the code that uses fat pointers that the code that does not.…”

Section: Pointer-based Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Boundary Bit: Architectural Bound Checking for Buffer-Overflow Protection

Chiamwongpaet

Piromsopa

2020

ECTI-CIT

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We propose Boundary Bit, a new architectural bound-checking approach that detects and prevents buffer-overflow attacks. Boundary Bit extends an architecture by associating a bit to each memory entry. Software can set a (boundary) bit to delimit an object. On each memory access, the hardware will dynamically validate the object's bound using the boundary bit. With minimal hints from the compiler, our architectural design eliminates most (if not all) types of buffer-overflow attacks. These include attacks on non-control data (variables and arguments) and array-indexing errors. We evaluate the performance of Boundary Bit using simulation, and the results show that the majority of performance overheads lies in bit scanning operations. To mitigate performance overheads, we introduce a hardware bitmap to act as a cache. The results from our simulation shows that the hardware bitmap can absorb most overhead from bit scanning, which in the best-case scenario translated to 30 times speed up compared to the version that does not utilize bitmap cache.

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Section: Pointer-based Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Boundary Bit: Architectural Bound Checking for Buffer-Overflow Protection

Chiamwongpaet

Piromsopa

2020

ECTI-CIT

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“…Many early software-based solutions, such as [43,18,45], store the base and bound of each buffer inside a pointer that points to the said buffer, which almost always involve changes to how a pointer is represented (into what is called a fat pointer). While this approach has many benefits, such as low memory and performance overhead, its major downside is the incompatibility between the code that uses fat pointers that the code that doesn't, which is a major concern because in practice it is not possible to recompile every program and libraries to use the same pointer representation as the instrumented code.…”

Section: Object-based Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Boundwarden: thread-enforced spatial memory safety through compile-time transformations

Dhumbumroong

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This dissertation presents BoundWarden, a novel runtime spatial memory safety enforcement technique that comprehensively detects and prevents buffer overflow and other out-of-bound errors in buffers on stack, heap, and BSS and data segments of memory. BoundWarden leverages the ubiquity of multi-core processors by offloading most of the works to a dedicated bound checking thread, which performs bound checking and manages metadata, thus reducing the runtime overhead. Since BoundWarden stores base and bound of buffers in a dedicated bound table, the memory layout of programs remains unchanged, thus preserving compatibility with existing libraries and binaries. Experiments showed that the prototype of BoundWarden is effective at enforcing spatial memory safety by successfully detected all 850 attacks of RIPE test suite, and 94% (1,092 out of 1,164 tests) of NIST SARD Test Suite 89, while the results from Olden benchmark showed that on average BoundWarden introduced roughly 2.25x overhead, compared to the uninstrumented code.

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A case study of run‐time errors in Pascal programs

LeBlanc

Fischer

1982

Softw Pract Exp

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The results of a case study in which over 100,000 Pascal program executions were monitored for run-time errors are reported. A large number of run-time errors in a wide variety of categories were observed. The data reported provided insight into the use and misuse of the features of Pascal by a large population of programmers. Some implications of these statistics on compiler implementation and programming language design are discussed. The number and variety of errors detected suggests that run-time checking mechanisms are inore important and useful than is generally recognized, judging by the incompleteness of such mechanisms in many compilers. KEY WORDS Pascal Run-time checking Error diagnostics Compiler implementation Zelkowitz,". '' which report a variety of statistics associated with PLUM, his

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Error checking with pointer variables

Cited by 6 publications

References 6 publications

Boundary Bit: Architectural Bound Checking for Buffer-Overflow Protection

Boundary Bit: Architectural Bound Checking for Buffer-Overflow Protection

Boundwarden: thread-enforced spatial memory safety through compile-time transformations

A case study of run‐time errors in Pascal programs

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