Mondriaan memory protection

Reliability and security are quickly becoming users' biggest concern due to the increasing reliance on computers in all areas of society. Hardware-enforced, fine-grained memory protection can increase the reliability and security of computer systems, but will be adopted only if the protection mechanism does not compromise performance, and if the hardware mechanism can be used easily by existing software. Mondriaan memory protection (MMP) provides fine-grained memory protection for a linear address space, while supporting an efficient hardware implementation. MMP's use of linear addressing makes it compatible with current software programming models and program binaries, and it is also backwards compatible with current operating systems and instruction sets. MMP can be implemented efficiently because it separates protection information from program data, allowing protection information to be compressed and cached efficiently. This organization is similar to paging hardware, where the translation information for a page of data bytes is compressed to a single translation value and cached in the TLB. MMP stores protection information in tables in protected system memory, just as paging hardware stores translation information in page tables. MMP is well suited to improve the robustness of modern software. Modern software development favors modules (or plugins) as a way to structure and provide extensibility for large systems, like operating systems, web servers and web clients. Protection between modules written in unsafe languages is currently provided only by programmer convention, reducing system stability.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2004

Author dc:creator

• Witchel, Emmett Jethro, 1970-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Krste Asanović.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/28330

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/28330