CCured in the Real World

1
CCured in the Real World

• Jeremy Condit Matthew Harren
• Scott McPeak George Necula
• Westley Weimer
• OSQ Retreat May 14, 2003

2
CCured Review

• What Guarantee memory safety in (legacy) C
  programs
• Why Useful for debugging, security
• How Static analysis runtime checks.
• Add bounds information, other metadata to each
  pointer

3
New Features

• Physical subtyping
• struct char int lt struct char
• Runtime Type Information for checked downcasts.
• Split representation of metadata allows
  interoperability with precompiled libraries.

4
Experiments

• Benchmark suites SPEC95, Olden, Ptrdist
• Less than 87 slowdown in all cases
• Less than 20 slowdown in half of the cases
• Purify and Valgrind have slowdown factor of 5-120
• Minimal slowdown on I/O-bound applications
• Linux kernel modules, Apache modules
• Cured many security-critical applications
• Includes sendmail, bind, ftpd, OpenSSL/SSH
• Can prevent known security flaws
• Can be used in production environments