Title: Intel MPX Explained: An Empirical Study of Intel MPX and Software-based Bounds Checking Approaches,
Abstract: Memory-safety violations are a prevalent cause of both reliability and
security vulnerabilities in systems software written in unsafe languages like
C/C++. Unfortunately, all the existing software-based solutions to this problem
exhibit high performance overheads preventing them from wide adoption in
production runs. To address this issue, Intel recently released a new ISA
extension - Memory Protection Extensions (Intel MPX), a hardware-assisted
full-stack solution to protect against memory safety violations. In this work,
we perform an exhaustive study of the Intel MPX architecture to understand its
advantages and caveats. We base our study along three dimensions: (a)
performance overheads, (b) security guarantees, and (c) usability issues. To
put our results in perspective, we compare Intel MPX with three prominent
software-based approaches: (1) trip-wire - AddressSanitizer, (2) object-based -
SAFECode, and (3) pointer-based - SoftBound. Our main conclusion is that Intel
MPX is a promising technique that is not yet practical for widespread adoption.
Intel MPX's performance overheads are still high (roughly 50% on average), and
the supporting infrastructure has bugs which may cause compilation or runtime
errors. Moreover, we showcase the design limitations of Intel MPX: it cannot
detect temporal errors, may have false positives and false negatives in
multithreaded code, and its restrictions on memory layout require substantial
code changes for some programs.