Effective memory protection using dynamic tainting

Programs written in languages that provide direct access to memory through pointers often contain memory-related faults, which may cause non-deterministic failures and even security vulnerabilities. In this paper, we present a new technique based on dynamic tainting for protecting programs from illegal memory accesses. When memory is allocated, at runtime, our technique taints both the memory and the corresponding pointer using the same taint mark. Taint marks are then suitably propagated while the program executes and are checked every time a memory address m is accessed through a pointer p; if the taint marks associated with m and p differ, the execution is stopped and the illegal access is reported. To allow for a low-overhead, hardware-assisted implementation of the approach, we make several key technical and engineering decisions in the definition of our technique. In particular, we use a configurable, low number of reusable taint marks instead of a unique mark for each area of...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: KBSE
• Authors: James A. Clause, Ioannis Doudalis, Alessandro Orso, Milos Prvulovic
• Keywords: Illegal Memory Accesses, KBSE 2007, Memory-related Faults, Software Engineering, Taint Marks