Integrating segmentation and paging protection for safe, efficient and transparent software extensions

Abstract

The trend towards extensible software architectures and component-based software development demands safe, efficient, and easy-to-use extension mechanisms to enforce protection boundaries among software modules residing in the same address space. This paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of a novel intra-address space protection mechanism called Palladium, which exploits the segmentation and paging hardware in the Intel X86 architecture and efficiently supports safe kernel-level and userlevel extensions in a way that is largely transparent to programmers and existing programming tools. Based on the considerations on ease of extension programming and systems implementation complexity, Palladium uses different approaches to support user-level and kernel-level extension mechanisms. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the Palladium architecture, we built a Web server that exploits the user-level extension mechanism to invoke CG1 scripts as local function calls in a safe way, and we constructed a compiled network packet filter that exploits the kernel-level extension mechanism to run packet-filtering binaries safely inside the kernel at native speed. The current Palladium prototype implementation demonstrates that a protected procedure call and return costs 142 CPU cycles on a Pentium 200MHz machine running Linux.