Title of thesis: MEMORY OVERFLOW PROTECTION FOR EMBEDDED SYSTEMS USING RUN-TIME CHECKS, REUSE AND COMPRESSION Surupa Biswas, Master of Science, 2004 Thesis directed by: Assistant Professor Rajeev Barua Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Out-of-memory errors are a serious source of unreliability in embedded systems. This is because embedded systems typically do not have hard disks and hence, no swap-space and in case of an out-of-memory error the application simply crashes. Further, in most cases protection from virtual memory is absent. Thus, the fact that a segment has exceeded its bound is not even detected and no pre-crash remedial action is possible. This work improves reliability in two ways. First, it proposes a low-overhead scheme of run-time checks which enables detection of out-of-memory errors and hence, allows the designer to incorporate system-specific remedial action. Second, it proposes five techniques to grow the stack or heap, after it is out of memory...