Adapting Software Fault Isolation to Contemporary CPU Architectures
Abstract
Software Fault Isolation (SFI) is an effective approach
to sandboxing binary code of questionable provenance,
an interesting use case for native plugins in a Web
browser. We present software fault isolation schemes for
ARM and x86-64 that provide control-flow and memory
integrity with average performance overhead of under
5% on ARM and 7% on x86-64. We believe these are the
best known SFI implementations for these architectures,
with significantly lower overhead than previous systems
for similar architectures. Our experience suggests that
these SFI implementations benefit from instruction-level
parallelism, and have particularly small impact for workloads that are data memory-bound, both properties that
tend to reduce the impact of our SFI systems for future
CPU implementations.
to sandboxing binary code of questionable provenance,
an interesting use case for native plugins in a Web
browser. We present software fault isolation schemes for
ARM and x86-64 that provide control-flow and memory
integrity with average performance overhead of under
5% on ARM and 7% on x86-64. We believe these are the
best known SFI implementations for these architectures,
with significantly lower overhead than previous systems
for similar architectures. Our experience suggests that
these SFI implementations benefit from instruction-level
parallelism, and have particularly small impact for workloads that are data memory-bound, both properties that
tend to reduce the impact of our SFI systems for future
CPU implementations.
Research Areas
