MemPatrol: Reliable Sideline Integrity Monitoring for High-Performance Systems

Integrity checking using inline reference monitors to check individual memory accesses in C/C++ programs remains prohibitively expensive for the most performance-critical applications. To address this, we developed MemPatrol, a “sideline” integrity monitor that allows us to minimize the amount of performance degradation at the expense of increased detection delay. Inspired by existing proposals, MemPatrol uses a dedicated monitor thread running in parallel with the other threads of the protected application. Previous proposals, however, either rely on costly isolation mechanisms, or introduce a vulnerability window between the attack and its detection. During this vulnerability window, malicious code can cover up memory corruption, breaking the security guarantee of “eventual detection” that comes with strong isolation. Our key contributions are (i) a novel userspace-based isolation mechanism to address the vulnerability window, and (ii) to successfully reduce the overhead incurred by the application’s threads to a level acceptable for a performance-critical application. We evaluate MemPatrol on a high-performance passive network monitoring system, demonstrating its low overheads, as well as the operator’s control of the trade-off between performance degradation and detection delay.