Enhancing Server Availability and Security Through Failure-Oblivious Computing

We present a new technique, failure-oblivious computing, that enables servers to execute through memory errors without memory corruption. Our safe compiler for C inserts checks that dynamically detect invalid memory accesses. Instead of terminating or throwing an exception, the generated code simply discards invalid writes and manufactures values to return for invalid reads, enabling the server to continue its normal execution path. We have applied failure-oblivious computing to a set of widely-used servers from the Linux-based opensource computing environment. Our results show that our techniques 1) make these servers invulnerable to known security attacks that exploit memory errors, and 2) enable the servers to continue to operate successfully to service legitimate requests and satisfy the needs of their users even after attacks trigger their memory errors. We observed several reasons for this successful continued execution. When the memory errors occur in irrelevant computations, f...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: OSDI
• Authors: Martin C. Rinard, Cristian Cadar, Daniel Dumitran, Daniel M. Roy, Tudor Leu, William S. Beebee
• Keywords: Critical Data Structures, Failure-oblivious Computing, Memory Errors, Operating System, OSDI 2004