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

Abstract

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.