Software Defined Memory Ownership System

reportActive / Technical Report | Accesssion Number: AD1143305 | Open PDF

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.

Author(s):
Huang, Alexander
Author Organization(s):
; Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Funding Organization(s):
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Washington , DC
Document Type:
Technical Report/Master's Thesis
Publication Date:
2020 Sep 01
Pagination:
65

Security Markings

DOCUMENT & CONTEXTUAL SUMMARY

Distribution Code:
A - Approved For Public Release
Distribution Statement: Public Release

RECORD

Collection: TRECMS
Identifying Numbers
Contract Number(s):
FA8702-15-D-0001
Subject Terms
Communities of Interest:
No COI(s) Identified
Descriptor(s):
operating systems, computer programming, computer science, kernels (operating system), computers, device drivers, programming languages, engineering, high level languages, electrical engineering, language, systems engineering, buffer overflow attack, compilers, education, guarantees, models
Keyword(s):
sdmos(Software Defined Memory Ownership System), zkos(Zero Kernel Operating System)
Subject Categories:
Mathematical and Computer Sciences; Mathematical and Computer Sciences
Creation Date:
2021 Jul 29
Update Date:
2021 Oct 18