Hardware/software optimization for array & pointer boundary checking against buffer overflow attacks
Research output: Journal Publications and Reviews (RGC: 21, 22, 62) › 21_Publication in refereed journal › peer-review
Author(s)
Detail(s)
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1129-1136 |
Journal / Publication | Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing |
Volume | 66 |
Issue number | 9 |
Publication status | Published - Sep 2006 |
Externally published | Yes |
Link(s)
Abstract
Malicious intrusions by buffer overflow attacks cause serious security problems and pose serious threats for networks and distributed systems such as clusters, Grids and P2P systems. Array & pointer boundary checking is one of the most effective approaches for defending against buffer overflow attacks. However, a big performance overhead may occur after boundary checking is applied. Typically, it may cause 2-5 times slowdown [T.M. Austin, E.B. Scott, S.S. Gurindar, Efficient detection of all pointer and array access errors, in: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN '94 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, 1994, pp. 290-301; R.W.M. Jones, P.H.J. Kelly, Backwards-compatible bounds checking for arrays and pointers in c programs, in: The Third International Workshop on Automated and Algorithmic Debugging, 1997, pp. 13-26]. In this paper, we propose a hardware/software method to optimize the performance of array & pointer boundary checking by designing a special boundary checking instruction. The experimental results show that our method can effectively reduce the overhead of array & pointer boundary checking. © 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Research Area(s)
- Array & pointer boundary checking, Buffer overflow, Hardware/software optimization
Citation Format(s)
Hardware/software optimization for array & pointer boundary checking against buffer overflow attacks. / Shao, Zili; Cao, Jiannong; Chan, Keith C.C.; Xue, Chun; Sha, Edwin H.-M.
In: Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, Vol. 66, No. 9, 09.2006, p. 1129-1136.Research output: Journal Publications and Reviews (RGC: 21, 22, 62) › 21_Publication in refereed journal › peer-review