[Colloquium] Leese/MS Presentation/March 13, 2008

[Margaret Jaffey]

This is an announcement of Maria Luisa (Lisa) Leese's MS Presentation.

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Date:  Thursday, March 13, 2008

Time:  3:00 p.m.

Place:  Ryerson 277

M.S. Candidate:  Maria Luisa Leese

M.S. Paper Title:  Transparent and Generalized Memory Supervision

Abstract:
User-level virtual memory protection is an important tool for numerous  
application domains, such as software security, garbage collection,  
and checkpointing. Security software, such as StackGuard and LibSafe,  
use memory protection to disallow illegal access to specific sections  
of memory for intrusion prevention. Likewise, generational garbage  
collectors can track writes to older generation using memory  
protection. Program checkpointing can be done by protecting uncopied  
data, copying the data when a write fault is signaled and resuming  
code execution.  This approach avoids lengthy performance delays.

Studies[Appel&Li] have shown that this heavy user-level interaction of  
the virtual memory is inefficient. We propose a light-weight mechanism  
that we call - memory supervision, that enables users to install and  
remove memory monitors, and permits installation of a self-defined  
handler to be executed upon a memory violation. Unlike past systems,  
our mechanism combines hardware and software to provide multi-granular  
memory protection to accommodate the needs of various applications.

We describe three scenarios that use our memory supervision and  
present experimental results. First, we adapted gcc to protect  
software against buffer overflows. Second, we implemented a  
generational garbage collector that tracks writes to the old  
generate.   Lastly, we describe how software transactional memory can  
use our work as well.

Advisor:  Prof. Anne Rogers

A draft copy of Lisa Leese's MS paper will be available soon in Ry 156.

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Margaret P. Jaffey                             margaret at cs.uchicago.edu
Department of Computer Science
Student Support Rep (Ry 156)        (773) 702-6011
The University of Chicago                  http://www.cs.uchicago.edu
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