Kernel Code Electric Fence

Buffer overflows are the most common bugs exploited by malicious hackers in order to attack computer systems. ElectricFence is a user-level library that, when compiled into an application, can detect some number of buffer overflow or underflow errors. ElectricFence does so by creating mmap-protected pages before or after an allocated buffer. This project aims to do the same for kernel code, but without the waste of actually allocating physical page frames, and by allowing the guardian pages to be turned on or off dynamically.

Conference and Workshop Papers:

# Title (click for html version) Formats Published In Date Comments
1 Kefence: An Electric Fence for Kernel Buffers PS PDF BibTeX First ACM International Workshop on Storage Security and Survivability (StorageSS 2005) held in conjunction with the 12th ACM CCS. Nov 2005 Won Best Short Paper Award.
2 Efficient and Safe Execution of User-Level Code in the Kernel PS PDF BibTeX NSF Next Generation Software Workshop, in conjunction with IPDPS 2005 Apr 2005  
3 Cosy: Develop in User-Land, Run in Kernel-Mode PS PDF BibTeX 9th Workshop in Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS IX) May 2003  
4 High-Confidence Operating Systems PS PDF BibTeX Tenth ACM SIGOPS European Workshop Sep 2002  

Technical Reports:

# Title (click for html version) Formats Published In Date Comments
1 A System for Improving Application Performance Through System Call Composition PS PDF BibTeX Stony Brook U. CS TechReport FSL-03-03 Jun 2003 M.S. Thesis

Past Students:

# Name (click for home page) Program Period Current Location
1 Sean Callanan PhD Sep 2003 - Aug 2009 Technical Staff Member, Apple (Cupertino, CA)
2 Nikolai Joukov PhD Jan 2004 - Dec 2006 Research Staff Member, Storage and Data Services Research group, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center (Hawthorne, NY)
3 Abhishek Rai PhD Sep 2003 - Aug 2005 Member of the Technical Staff, Structured Data Access group, VMware, Inc. (Palo Alto, CA)
4 Gopalan Sivathanu PhD Sep 2003 - May 2008 Software Engineer, Systems Infrastructure group, Google (Mountain View, CA)
5 Charles P. Wright PhD May 2003 - May 2006 Research Staff Member, High Performance Systems Software group, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center (Hawthorne, NY)
6 Alexander Butler MS May 2003 - Dec 2003 Member of Technical Staff, Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories (ATL) (Cherry Hill, New Jersey)
7 Mohan-Krishna Channa-Reddy MS May 2003 - Dec 2003 Software Developer, Bloomberg (New York, NY)
8 Salil Gokhale MS May 2003 - Dec 2003 Associate Research Staff Member, NEC Labs (Princeton, New Jersey)
9 Aditya Kashyap MS Sep 2003 - Dec 2004 Senior Analyst, Fixed Income Research group, Lehman Brothers (New York, NY)
10 Devaki Kulkarni MS Sep 2003 - Dec 2004 Staff Engineer, Performance and Storage groups, VMware, Inc. (Palo Alto, CA)

Sponsors:

# Sponsor Amount Period Type Title (click for award abstract)
1 NSF CAREER (NGS) $400,000 2002-2007 Sole PI CAREER: An In-Kernel Runtime Execution Environment for User-Level Programs
2 HP/Intel $131,529 2002-2003 Sole PI Linux Application Performance and File System Security
3 HP/Intel $22,490 2001-2002 Sole PI Linux Network Scalability and File System Reliability

(Last updated: Tue Mar 2 22:47:59 EST 2010)