Are common memory protection mechanisms adequate?

By Codasip

October 12, 2023

In the previous blog post we looked at the ruinous costs of allowing unsafe memory access. However, there are generally existing protection mechanisms that are designed into processors. Can these be relied upon to give adequate protection? We will look at some common mechanisms and consider how effective they are at dealing with common memory-related vulnerabilities.

What is processor integrity?

When we think of integrity problems with processors, we generally think of malicious code injection. For example, loading malware during a boot, installing malware during a firmware update, or importing malicious code from an app or website.

However, not all integrity issues have malicious causes. Corruption of data and program crashes can be the direct result of how software is written. Similarly, not every program should be able to access every processor resource except in the case of simple bare-metal embedded applications.

Various methods are commonly used to address processor integrity, including:

• Chain of trust
• Privilege modes
• Memory protection
• Execution enclaves.

Let’s now briefly consider each of these.

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