Heaven or Hell: Vulnerability Defense Characterization and Evolution

Memory vulnerabilities and bugs become one of the most severe problem in today's system security.Due to the low-level languages' unsound memory control and protection, an increasing number of memory vulnerabilities exist over years.Researchers and practitioners propose many defense mechanisms, trying to overcome the shortcomings of the current memory protection model.We provide a survey on these mechanisms and compare them against each other. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.We also show why most of these methods are not adopted by today's commodity operating systems, and offer suggestions on how to find a sweet spot between usability and security