Commissariat &#xc0; L'&#xc9;nergie Atomique Et Aux &#xc9;nergies Alternatives

Kostyantyn Vorobyov

Nikolay Kosmatov

Julien Signoles

A method is provided that allows tracking boundaries of allocated memory blocks while still capturing byte-level properties. This is achieved with a particular shadow memory encoding scheme which captures boundaries and lengths of allocated memory blocks. Analyzing the shadow memory state allows detecting memory safety issues. In particular, for a memory location given by its address a, the proposed invention allows computing the following information: whether a has been allocated, whether a has been initialized, the start (base) address of the memory block a belongs to, the byte-length of the memory block a belongs to, the byte offset of a within its block. Such information allows for detection of specific memory safety issues at runtime.

Computer-implemented method and a system for encoding a stack application memory state using shadow memory

A computer-implemented method for encoding an application memory that a program, executed on a computer, has access to, using a shadow memory corresponding to the application memory, the method comprises: creating and initializing a shadow memory divided into segments, each segment in the application memory being mapped to a corresponding segment in the shadow memory, for each memory block in the application memory that the program allocates, encoding a corresponding shadow memory block, in the shadow memory, by: defining a meta segment preceding the first segment of the memory block in the application memory, and a corresponding shadow meta segment in the shadow memory block, writing in the shadow meta segment a first value indicative of the size of the memory block, writing, in each subsequent segment of the shadow memory block, a second value indicative of the offset between the segment and the first segment of the shadow memory block.

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Palaiseau, France

Kostyantyn Vorobyov