SHF: Small: Auxiliary Hardware/Software Mechanisms for Flexible Memory Access Control

SHF：小型：用于灵活内存访问控制的辅助硬件/软件机制

• 批准号: 1016902
• 负责人: Sandhya Dwarkadas
• 金额: $ 46万
• 依托单位: University of Rochester
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-09-01 至 2014-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1016902&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SHF; Small; Auxiliary; Hardware; Software

The reliability, safety, and security of today's applications depend on controlled data accesses and updates during execution. For instance, many emerging applications are composed of multiple software modules. To protect these modules from each other within a single address space, inter-module operations need to be carefully monitored and controlled. Additionally, the reliability of online systems can benefit from live checking of memory access errors such as buffer overflows, memory leaks, and accesses to uninitialized data. Similarly, memory access monitoring can support information flow mtracking in a complex system for enhanced security.Available mechanisms in today's processors are tied to support for virtual memory, making implementation of access control both heavy weight and coarse grained. The proposed research will design and utilize new light-weight memory access control mechanisms that are independent of and subordinate to existing system memory protection. At the hardware level, this approach minimizes impact on the processor core by placing the access control mechanisms outside the common critical path. At the operating system level, the required support is largely outside of the kernel memory management functions, incurring overhead only when exercised. Such auxiliary mechanisms are more amenable to practical deployment, yet they are capable of supporting fine-grained and flexible memory protection. In conjunction with these hardware/software mechanisms, the research will devise a new protection model that can be manipulated either at user or privileged level based on an application's requirements. The flexible, efficient memory monitoring framework developed will enable debugging tools that can help detect memory access errors such as out-of-bound accesses, and help enforce data security or privacy policies in live systems. The proposed work will target a wide variety of applications and utilizations with a view to validating the goal of improved programmer productivity.

当今应用程序的可靠性，安全性和安全性取决于执行过程中受控的数据访问和更新。 例如，许多新兴应用程序由多个软件模块组成。为了在单个地址空间中保护这些模块，需要仔细监控和控制模块间操作。 此外，在线系统的可靠性可以从实时检查内存访问错误（例如缓冲区溢出，内存泄漏以及对非初始化数据的访问）中受益。 同样，内存访问监视可以支持复杂系统中的信息流动，以增强安全性。当今的处理器中可用的机制绑定在支持虚拟内存中，从而实现了访问控制重量和粗粒。拟议的研究将设计并利用独立于现有系统存储器保护的新的轻重量访问控制机制。 在硬件级别上，这种方法通过将访问控制机制放置在常见的关键路径之外，从而最大程度地减少了对处理器核心的影响。 在操作系统级别上，所需的支持在很大程度上位于内核内存管理功能之外，仅在锻炼时才会产生开销。这种辅助机制更适合实际部署，但它们能够支持细粒度和灵活的记忆保护。结合这些硬件/软件机制，该研究将设计一种新的保护模型，该模型可以根据应用程序的要求在用户或特权级别进行操作。开发的灵活，高效的内存监视框架将启用调试工具，以帮助检测内存访问错误，例如越野访问，并帮助实时系统中的数据安全或隐私策略执行。 拟议的工作将针对多种应用和利用，以验证提高程序员生产率的目标。