Abstract

In this talk, I will present recent work in my group that explores the use of advanced metadata encoding schemes to overcome limitations in memory safety overhead and checking accuracy. First, I will describe In-Fat Pointer – a fat-pointer encoding scheme that uses hardware-acceleration to encode more information into a tagged-pointer to enable fine-grain checking of intra-object overflows. Then, I will discuss a technique that enables the simultaneous use of two different fat-pointer sizes, to reduce pointer scheme encoding overhead for objects that don’t need it. Finally, I will briefly discuss future directions for memory safety schemes.