Hardbound: architectural support for spatial safety of the C programming language

The C programming language is at least as well known for its absence of spatial memory safety guarantees (i.e., lack of bounds checking) as it is for its high performance. C's unchecked pointer arithmetic and array indexing allow simple programming mistakes to lead to erroneous executions, silent data corruption, and security vulnerabilities. Many prior proposals have tackled enforcing spatial safety in C programs by checking pointer and array accesses. However, existing software-only proposals have significant drawbacks that may prevent wide adoption, including: unacceptably high runtime overheads, lack of completeness, incompatible pointer representations, or need for non-trivial changes to existing C source code and compiler infrastructure. Inspired by the promise of these software-only approaches, this paper proposes a hardware bounded pointer architectural primitive that supports cooperative hardware/software enforcement of spatial memory safety for C programs. This bounded ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Joe Devietti, Colin Blundell, Milo M. K. Martin, Steve Zdancewic
• Keywords: ASPLOS 2008, Bounded Pointers, Hardware Bounded Pointers, Programming Languages, Spatial Memory Safety