CODOMs: Protecting software with code-centric memory domains

Abstract

Today's complex software systems are neither secure nor reliable. The rudimentary software protection primitives provided by current hardware forces systems to run many distrusting software components (e.g., procedures, libraries, plugins, modules) in the same protection domain, or otherwise suffer degraded performance from address space switches. We present CODOMs (COde-centric memory DOMains), a novel architecture that can provide finer-grained isolation between software components with effectively zero run-time overhead, all at a fraction of the complexity of other approaches. An implementation of CODOMs in a cycle-accurate full-system x86 simulator demonstrates that with the right hardware support, finer-grained protection and run-time performance can peacefully coexist.