2026-09-19T12:59:39Zhttps://dspace.mit.edu/server/oai/requestoai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/1195512026-06-06T00:55:26Zcom_1721.1_7582com_1721.1_7581col_1721.1_131023
Howard E. Shrobe and Hamed Okhravi.
Gil, Ronald, M. Eng. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
2018-12-11T20:39:47Z
2018-12-11T20:39:47Z
2018
2018
http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/119551
1076273115
Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2018.
This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 59-64).
In this thesis, we explore full memory safety and the various intricacies involved. We analyze existing memory safety techniques in both hardware and software and their many different goals. This task involves determining the limits of the protections guaranteed by these different protection systems, regardless of whether they were explicitly or implicitly stated. It is demonstrated that the common software technique of protecting only allocation bounds does not provide nearly enough of a barrier for attackers. Then, we go beyond particular schemes and examine the limitations of languages, C in particular. We discover many corner cases and ambiguities that prevent even the best possible protection system from providing full memory safety in the context of the C language specification. We also collect some results for the prevalence of these issues, present approaches to further analyze them, and consider how they might extend into other languages or systems.
by Ronald Gil.
M.Eng.
64 pages
eng
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.
http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
The undefined quest for full memory safety
Thesis
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