Software Defined Memory Ownership System

Abstract

We build the Software Defined Memory Ownership System, or SDMOS, that enforces safe MMIO interactions in the Zero-Kernel Operating System (ZKOS), an operating system written in Rust. SDMOS leverages a tagged architecture to embed semantic metadata with IO memory regions and low-level device driver code in addition to policies that define proper MMIO access at varying levels of granularity. We also implement a pipeline to apply tags at the compiler level, minimizing the amount of manual tagging. Our results show that SDMOS eliminates memory corruption resulting from buggy user space applications and device drivers. The main factor that dictates performance of SDMOS is the total number of rules installed to the tag cache. Our evaluations show that SDMOSs cache load should not exceed the capacity of most cache implementations.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 01, 2020
Accession Number
AD1143305

Entities

People

  • Alexander Huang

Organizations

  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Buffer Overflow Attack
  • Compilers
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Device Drivers
  • Education
  • Electrical Engineering
  • Engineering
  • Guarantees
  • High Level Languages
  • Kernels (Operating System)
  • Language
  • Models
  • Operating Systems
  • Programming Languages
  • Systems Engineering

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Agricultural Chemistry/Soil Science
  • Database Systems and Applications
  • Distributed Systems and Data Platform Development

Technology Areas

  • Space