Efficient array & pointer bound checking against buffer overflow attacks via hardware/software

Buffer overflow attacks cause serious security problems. Array & pointer bound checking is one of the most effective approaches for defending against buffer overflow attacks when source code is available. However, original array & pointer bound checking causes too much overhead since it is designed to catch memory errors and it puts too many checks. In this paper, we propose an efficient array & pointer bound checking strategy to defend against buffer overflow attacks. In our strategy, only the bounds of write operations are checked. We discuss the optimization strategy via hardware/software and conduct experiments. The experimental results show that our strategy can greatly reduce the overhead of array & pointer bound checking. Our conclusion is that based on our strategy, array & pointer bound checking can be a practical solution for defending systems against buffer overflow attacks with tolerable overhead. © 2005 IEEE.