PULP: Inner-process Isolation based on the Program Counter and Data Memory Address

TL;DR

PULP is a hardware-based in-process isolation system that uses program counter and memory address association to prevent vulnerabilities like buffer overflows and Spectre, with minimal runtime overhead.

Contribution

This paper introduces PULP, a novel hardware mechanism for in-process data isolation that effectively prevents memory vulnerabilities with negligible performance impact.

Findings

PULP effectively prevents in-process bugs like Heartbleed and buffer overflows.

PULP incurs less than 0.1% runtime overhead on SPEC2006 benchmarks.

PULP can mitigate the Spectre vulnerability in out-of-order processors.

Abstract

Plenty of in-process vulnerabilities are blamed on various out of bound memory accesses. Previous prevention methods are mainly based on software checking associated with performance overhead, while traditional hardware protection mechanisms only work for inter-process memory accesses. In this paper we propose a novel hardware based in-process isolation system called PULP (Protection by User Level Partition). PULP modifies processor core by associating program counter and virtual memory address to achieve in-process data isolation. PULP partitions the program into two distinct parts, one is reliable, called primary functions, and the other is unreliable, called secondary functions, the accessible memory range of which can be configured via APIs. PULP automatically checks the memory bound when executing load/store operations in secondary functions. A RISC-V based FPGA prototype is implementated and functional test shows that PULP can effectively prevent in-process bug, including the Heartbleed and other buffer overflow vulnerabilities, etc. The total runtime overhead of PULP is negligible, as there is no extra runtime overhead besides configuring the API. We run SPEC2006 to evaluate the average performance, considering the LIBC functions as secondary functions. Experimental timing results show that, running bzip2, mcf, and libquantum, PULP bears low runtime overhead (less than 0.1%). Analysis also shows that PULP can be used effectively to prevent the newest "Spectre" bug which threats nearly all out-of-order processors.