ARMlock

Abstract

Software fault isolation (SFI) is an effective mechanism to confine untrusted modules inside isolated domains to protect their host applications. Since its debut, researchers have proposed different SFI systems for many purposes such as safe execution of untrusted native browser plugins. However, most of these systems focus on the x86 architecture. Inrecent years, ARM has become the dominant architecture for mobile devices and gains in popularity in data centers.Hence there is a compellingneed for an efficient SFI system for the ARM architecture. Unfortunately, existing systems either have prohibitively high performance overhead or place various limitations on the memory layout and instructions of untrusted modules.