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Type

of Talk: UTCS Colloquium/ Architecture

Speaker/ Affiliation: Milo Mar

tin/University of Pennsylvania

Date/Time: Monday, October 19, 2009

, 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Host: Yale Patt

Talk Title: "Sec

ure Low-Level Programming via Hardware-Assisted Memory-Safe C"

Talk Abstract:

Many security vulnerabilities and memory corruption bu

gs stem from a design flaw in the C programming language: its lack of memor

y bounds checking. Although modern languages such as Java avoid such proble

ms by enforcing memory safety, most low-level systems code that exists tod

ay is written in C or C++. In this talk I will describe both the significan

t obstacles to efficiently retrofitting legacy C code with complete bounds

checking and the solutions my group has been developing to meet these chall

enges. Specifically, we have proposed a hardware-assisted approach (HardBo

und) and a software-only compiler-based implementation (SoftBound), both o

f which use disjoint storage of pointer metadata to provide efficient and h

ighly compatible bounds checking for legacy C source code.

Speaker Bi

o: 

Milo Martin is an Assistant Professor in the Computer and I

nformation Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania. His resear

ch focuses on making computers easier to design, verify, and program. Spe

cific projects include transactional memory, adaptive cache coherence prot

ocols, hardware-aware verification of concurrent software, and hardware-a

ssisted memory-safe implementations of the C programming language. Dr. Mart

in is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award and received a PhD from the Unive

rsity of Wisconsin- Madison.

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----------------------------------------
The Computer Architecture Sem

inar Series is sponsored jointly by the
Departments of Computer Scienc

e and Electrical & Computer Engineering 
and is supported

by a grant from IBM.

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