Security News > 2021 > June > Boffins promise protection and perfect performance with new ZeRØ, No-FAT memory safety techniques

Researchers at the Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science have showcased two new approaches to providing computers with memory protection without sacrificing performance - and they're being implemented in silicon by the US Air Force Research Lab.

Take the Spectre and Meltdown families of vulnerabilities, for example: speculative execution frameworks added to improve performance have turned into a boon for ne'er-do-wells looking to access secrets hidden in supposedly protected memory regions.

The first of the papers, ZeRØ, presents a novel set of memory instructions and a new encoding scheme for metadata, designed to protect both the code and the pointers of a computing system.

"ZeRØ offers memory security at no cost and it is a perfect complement to systems that mitigate memory attacks," said fourth-year PhD student Mohamed Tarek, co-author on the papers.

The second paper, No-FAT, aims to reduce the overhead of checking memory safety in the first place.

Designed to dramatically boost the speed of fuzzing analyses, an automated approach to finding security vulnerabilities, No-FAT uses memory binning to improve performance.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/06/23/zero_no_fat_memory_safety/