InfoShield: a security architecture for protecting information usage in memory

Cyber theft is a serious threat to Internet security. It is one of the major security concerns by both network service providers and Internet users. Though sensitive information can be encrypted when stored in non-volatile memory such as hard disks, for many e-commerce and network applications, sensitive information is often stored as plaintext in main memory. Documented and reported exploits facilitate an adversary stealing sensitive information from an application's memory. These exploits include illegitimate memory scan, information theft oriented buffer overflow, invalid pointer manipulation, integer overflow, password stealing trojans and so forth. Today's computing system and its hardware cannot address these exploits effectively in a coherent way. This paper presents a unified and lightweight solution, called InfoShield, that can strengthen application protection against theft of sensitive information such as passwords, encryption keys, and other private data with a m...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: HPCA
• Authors: Guofei Gu, Hsien-Hsin S. Lee, Joshua B. Fryman, Jun Yang 0002, Weidong Shi, Youtao Zhang
• Keywords: Computer Architecture, Critical Sensitive Information, HPCA 2006, Illegitimate Memory Scan, Sensitive Information