SafeMem: Exploiting ECC-Memory for Detecting Memory Leaks and Memory Corruption During Production Runs

Memory leaks and memory corruption are two major forms of software bugs that severely threaten system availability and security. According to the US-CERT Vulnerability Notes Database, 68% of all reported vulnerabilities in 2003 were caused by memory leaks or memory corruption. Dynamic monitoring tools, such as the state-of-the-art Purify, are commonly used to detect memory leaks and memory corruption. However, most of these tools suffer from high overhead, with up to a 20 times slowdown, making them infeasible to be used for production-runs. This paper proposes a tool called SafeMem to detect memory leaks and memory corruption on-the-fly during production-runs. This tool does not rely on any new hardware support. Instead, it makes a novel use of existing ECC memory technology and exploits intelligent dynamic memory usage behavior analysis to detect memory leaks and corruption. We have evaluated SafeMem with seven real-world applications that contain memory leak or memory corruption bu...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: HPCA
• Authors: Feng Qin, Shan Lu, Yuanyuan Zhou
• Keywords: Computer Architecture, HPCA 2005, Intelligent Dynamic Memory, Memory Corruption Bugs, Memory Leaks