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1. BOGO: Buy Spatial Memory Safety, Get Temporal Memory Safety (Almost) Free

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3297858.3304017  

   Zhang, Tong; Lee, Dongyoon; Jung, Changhee (April 2019, Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems)
2. Fat Pointers for Temporal Memory Safety of C

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3586038  

   Zhou, Jie; Criswell, John; Hicks, Michael (April 2023, Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages)

   Temporal memory safety bugs, especially use-after-free and double free bugs, pose a major security threat to C programs. Real-world exploits utilizing these bugs enable attackers to read and write arbitrary memory locations, causing disastrous violations of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Many previous solutions retrofit temporal memory safety to C, but they all either incur high performance overhead and/or miss detecting certain types of temporal memory safety bugs. In this paper, we propose a temporal memory safety solution that is both efficient and comprehensive. Specifically, we extend Checked C, a spatially-safe extension to C, with temporally-safe pointers. These are implemented by combining two techniques: fat pointers and dynamic key-lock checks. We show that the fat-pointer solution significantly improves running time and memory overhead compared to the disjoint-metadata approach that provides the same level of protection. With empirical program data and hands-on experience porting real-world applications, we also show that our solution is practical in terms of backward compatibility---one of the major complaints about fat pointers. 

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3. Deciding memory safety for single-pass heap-manipulating programs

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3371103  

   Mathur, Umang; Murali, Adithya; Krogmeier, Paul; Madhusudan, P.; Viswanathan, Mahesh (December 2019, Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages)

   We investigate the decidability of automatic program verification for programs that manipulate heaps, and in particular, decision procedures for proving memory safety for them. We extend recent work that identified a decidable subclass of uninterpreted programs to a class of alias-aware programs that can update maps. We apply this theory to develop verification algorithms for memory safety— determining if a heap-manipulating program that allocates and frees memory locations and manipulates heap pointers does not dereference an unallocated memory location. We show that this problem is decidable when the initial allocated heap forms a forest data-structure and when programs arestreaming-coherent, which intuitively restricts programs to make a single pass over a data-structure. Our experimental evaluation on a set of library routines that manipulate forest data-structures shows that common single-pass algorithms on data-structures often fall in the decidable class, and that our decision procedure is efficient in verifying them. 

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4. WHISTLE: CPU Abstractions for Hardware and Software Memory Safety Invariants

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.2022.3180990  

   Kim, Sungkeun; Mahmud, Farabi; Huang, Jiayi; Majumder, Pritam; Tsai, Chia-Che; Muzahid, Abdullah; Kim, Eun Jung (June 2022, IEEE Transactions on Computers)

   Memory safety invariants extracted from a program can help defend and detect against both software and hardware memory violations. For instance, by allowing only specific instructions to access certain memory locations, system can detect out-of-bound or illegal pointer dereferences that lead to correctness and security issues. In this paper, we propose CPU abstractions, called, to specify and check program invariants to provide defense mechanism against both software and hardware memory violations at runtime. ensures that the invariants must be satisfied at every memory accesses. We present a fast invariant address translation and retrieval scheme using a specialized cache. It stores and checks invariants related to global, stack and heap objects. The invariant checks can be performed synchronously or asynchronously. uses synchronous checking for high security-critical programs, while others are protected by asynchronous checking. A fast exception is proposed to alert any violations as soon as possible in order to close the gap for transient attacks. Our evaluation shows that can detect both software and hardware, spatial and temporal memory violations. incurs 53% overhead when checking synchronously, or 15% overhead when checking asynchronously. 

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5. Building for ‘We’: Safety Settings for Couples with Memory Concerns

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445071  

   McDonald, Nora; Mentis, Helena M. (January 2021, Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)

   null (Ed.)

   Designing technologies that support the mutual cybersecurity and autonomy of older adults facing cognitive challenges requires close collaboration of partners. As part of research to design a Safety Setting application for older adults with memory loss or mild cognitive impairment (MCI), we use a scenario-based participatory design. Our study builds on previous findings that couples’ approach to memory loss was characterized by a desire for flexibility and choice, and an embrace of role uncertainty. We find that couples don't want a system that fundamentally alters their relationship and are looking to maximize self-surveillance competence and minimize loss of autonomy for their partners. All desire Safety Settings to maintain their mutual safety rather than designating one partner as the target of oversight. Couples are open to more rigorous surveillance if they have control over what types of activities trigger various levels of oversight. 

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