In-process Memory Isolation Using Hardware Watchpoint

Memory disclosure vulnerabilities have been exploited in the leaking of application secret data such as crypto keys (e.g., the Heartbleed Bug). To ameliorate this problem, we propose an in-process memory isolation mechanism by leveraging a common hardware-feature, namely, hardware debugging. Specifically, we utilize a watchpoint to monitor a particular memory region containing secret data. We implemented the PoC of our approach based on the 64-bit ARM architecture, including the kernel patches and user APIs that help developers benefit from isolated memory use. We applied the approach to open-source applications such as OpenSSL and AESCrypt. The results of a performance evaluation show that our approach incurs a small amount of overhead.