Memory Tagging and how it improves C/C++ memory safety

2018/02/26 by Kostya Serebryany, Serebryany, Kostya, Evgenii Stepanov +7 · 1 voice · 9 citations
#cs.CR #cs.AR #cs.PL

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1802.09517

Abstract

Memory safety in C and C++ remains largely unresolved. A technique usually called "memory tagging" may dramatically improve the situation if implemented in hardware with reasonable overhead. This paper describes two existing implementations of memory tagging: one is the full hardware implementation in SPARC; the other is a partially hardware-assisted compiler-based tool for AArch64. We describe the basic idea, evaluate the two implementations, and explain how they improve memory safety. This paper is intended to initiate a wider discussion of memory tagging and to motivate the CPU and OS vendors to add support for it in the near future.

Cited by

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• ARM MTE Performance in Practice (Extended Version)
• SafeFFI: Efficient Sanitization at the Boundary Between Safe and Unsafe Code in Rust and Mixed-Language Applications
• NanoTag: Systems Support for Efficient Byte-Granular Overflow Detection on ARM MTE
• μFork: Supporting POSIX fork Within a Single-Address-Space OS
• Beyond Tag Collision: Cluster-based Memory Management for Tag-based Sanitizers
• Empirical Security Analysis of Software-based Fault Isolation through Controlled Fault Injection

Discussions

• Memory Tagging and how it improves C/C++ memory safety [hn, 119 points, 36 comments]

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• Memory Tagging: A Memory Efficient Design
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• PTSan: A Practical Memory Safety Sanitizer for C/C++ with Pointer-Object Authority