Byte-level Object Bounds Protection
This addresses security vulnerabilities in low-level C programs for developers and systems requiring efficient memory protection, though it is incremental as it builds on alignment-based solutions.
The paper tackles the problem of out-of-bounds memory corruption in C programs by presenting PRISM, a precise object-bounds scheme that eliminates runtime overhead from metadata lookups while retaining standard C semantics, achieving a mean CPU overhead of 46.1% on SPEC 2017 and an 11.1% throughput reduction in a saturated Apache web server.
Low-level C programs remain highly vulnerable to out-of-bounds memory corruption. State-of-the-art precise defenses either introduce severe runtime overhead due to metadata memory lookups, or break standard C semantics by disallowing partial structs or the creation of an object's end address (EA), a legal operation ubiquitous in real-world C code. Conversely, practical alignment-based solutions achieve efficiency only by relaxing protected bounds. We present PRISM, a precise, zero-lookup object-bounds scheme that eliminates these restrictions. PRISM compresses a 47-bit EA into the 17-bit unused tag area of a 64-bit pointer. By enforcing the invariant that a statically known starting address (KSA) cannot exceed the EA, PRISM completely eliminates the need for costly metadata memory fetches in nearly all bounds checks, while strictly retaining precise object bounds. Our invariant also simplifies the lower-bound checks in existing alignment-based solutions, thus improving their performance. To achieve high throughput, PRISM introduces q-padding, an optimization that safely removes bounds checks for constant-offset accesses (such as struct fields) while maintaining precise, byte-level protection for the variable-indexed accesses primarily exploited by attackers. Evaluated on SPEC 2017, PRISM achieves an arithmetic mean CPU overhead of 46.1\% with a 32-byte q-padding (dropping to 31.3\% in a 32-bit address space). On highly concurrent, real-world workloads, PRISM secures a fully saturated Apache web server with only an 11.1\% throughput reduction, demonstrating its readiness for production deployment. Furthermore, PRISM successfully detected an out-of-bounds violation in \texttt{gcc} that prior tools missed due to their lack of support for partial structs.