Summary: Efficient Software­Based Fault Isolation
Robert Wahbe Steven Lucco Thomas E. Anderson Susan L. Graham
Computer Science Division
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
Abstract
One way to provide fault isolation among cooperating
software modules is to place each in its own address
space. However, for tightly­coupled modules, this so­
lution incurs prohibitive context switch overhead. In
this paper, we present a software approach to imple­
menting fault isolation within a single address space.
Our approach has two parts. First, we load the code
and data for a distrusted module into its own fault do­
main, a logically separate portion of the application's
address space. Second, we modify the object code of a
distrusted module to prevent it from writing or jump­
ing to an address outside its fault domain. Both these
software operations are portable and programming lan­
guage independent.

Source: Anderson, Tom - Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington at Seattle

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences