2021/11/28 by Wei Song, Jiameng Ying, Song, Wei +10
Computer Science · Engineering · #Cloud Data Security Solutions #Compiler #Computer science #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #Embedded system #Extended memory #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Hardware Architecture (cs.AR) #Memory management #Memory protection #Memory safety #Operating system #Porting #Radiation Effects in Electronics #Security and Verification in Computing #Semiconductor memory #Software #Software portability #Suite #Test case #Test suite #cs.AR #cs.CR
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2111.14072
published in arXiv (Cornell University) (Cornell University)
arxiv created 2021/11/28 · openalex publication_date 2021/11/28 · arxiv updated 2021/11/30 · openalex created_date 2021/12/06 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Memory safety remains a critical and widely violated property in reality. Numerous defense techniques have been proposed and developed but most of them are not applied or enabled by default in production-ready environment due to their substantial running cost. The situation might change in the near future because the hardware supported defenses against these attacks are finally beginning to be adopted by commercial processors, operating systems and compilers. We then face a question as there is currently no suitable test suite to measure the memory safety extensions supported on different processors. In fact, the issue is not constrained only for memory safety but all aspect of processor security. All of the existing test suites related to processor security lack some of the key properties, such as comprehensiveness, distinguishability and portability. As an initial step, we propose an expandable test framework for measuring the processor security and open source a memory safety test suite utilizing this framework. The framework is deliberately designed to be flexible so it can be gradually extended to all types of hardware supported security extensions in processors. The initial test suite for memory safety currently contains 160 test cases covering spatial and temporal safety of memory, memory access control, pointer integrity and control-flow integrity. Each type of vulnerabilities and their related defenses have been individually evaluated by one or more test cases. The test suite has been ported to three different instruction set architectures (ISAs) and experimented on six different platforms. We have also utilized the test suite to explore the security benefits of applying different sets of compiler flags available on the latest GNU GCC and LLVM compilers.