Computing Community Consortium Blog

The goal of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. The purpose of this blog is to provide a more immediate, online mechanism for dissemination of visioning concepts and community discussion/debate about them.


Posts Tagged ‘memory

 

Capabilities Reincarnated: Compatibility and Better Memory Protection

July 15th, 2014 / in research horizons, Research News / by Ann Drobnis

The following is a special contribution to this blog by by CCC Executive Council Member Mark D. Hill of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Background: Senior computer scientists remember memory “capabilities” as an abstraction for controlling access to objects in machines such as Burroughs B5000 and IBM System/38. In the late 20th century, capabilities lost out to virtual memory with a linear address and per-page protection, as these systems were faster and coarse-grain protection was deemed sufficient. In our 21st century, security is much more important and memory attacks often cross object boundaries (e.g., buffer overflow attacks). Vision:  Wouldn’t it be interesting if one could reincarnate capabilities for better memory security […]