We present SafeDrive, a system for detecting and recovering from type safety violations in software extensions. SafeDrive has low overhead and requires minimal changes to existing source code. To achieve this result, SafeDrive uses a novel type system that provides finegrained isolation for existing extensions written in C. In addition, SafeDrive tracks invariants using simple wrappers for the host system API and restores them when recovering from a violation. This approach achieves finegrained memory error detection and recovery with few code changes and at a significantly lower performance cost than existing solutions based on hardware-enforced domains, such as Nooks, L4, and Xen, or software-enforced domains, such as SFI. The principles used in SafeDrive can be applied to any large system with loadable, error-prone extension modules.

In this paper we describe our experience using SafeDrive for protection and recovery of a variety of Linux device drivers. In order to apply SafeDrive to these device drivers, we had to change less than 4% of the source code. SafeDrive recovered from all 44 crashes due to injected faults in a network card driver. In experiments with 6 different drivers, we observed increases in kernel CPU utilization of 4–23% with no noticeable degradation in end-to-end performance.

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In: Operating System Design and Implementation (OSDI '06)

Publisher: USENIX
All copyrights reserved by USENIX 2007

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