Efficient Memory Shadowing for 64-bit Architectures

Abstract

Shadow memory is used by dynamic program analysis tools to store metadata for tracking properties of application memory. The efficiency of mapping between application memory and shadow memory has substantial impact on the overall performance of such analysis tools. However, traditional memory mapping schemes that work well on 32-bit architectures cannot easily port to 64-bit architectures due to the much larger 64-bit address space.

This paper presents EMS64, an efficient memory shadowing scheme for 64-bit architectures. By taking advantage of application reference locality and unused regions in the 64-bit address space, EMS64 provides a fast and flexible memory mapping scheme without relying on any underlying platform features or requiring any specific shadow memory size. Our experiments show that EMS64 is able to reduce the runtime shadow memory translation overhead to 81% on average, which almost halves the overhead of the fastest 64-bit shadow memory system we are aware of.