Article

Efficient type and memory safety for tiny embedded systems

Authors:

John Regehr,

Nathan Cooprider,

Will Archer,

Eric EideAuthors Info & Claims

PLOS '06: Proceedings of the 3rd workshop on Programming languages and operating systems: linguistic support for modern operating systems

Pages 6 - es

https://doi.org/10.1145/1215995.1216001

Published: 22 October 2006 Publication History

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Abstract

We report our experience in implementing type and memory safety in an efficient manner for sensor network nodes running TinyOS: tiny embedded systems running legacy, C-like code. A compiler for a safe language must often insert dynamic checks into the programs it produces; these generally make programs both larger and slower. In this paper, we describe our novel compiler toolchain, which uses a family of techniques to minimize or avoid these run-time costs. Our results show that safety can in fact be implemented cheaply on low-end 8-bit microcontrollers.

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Cited By

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García AMay DNutting E(2021)Integrated Hardware Garbage CollectionACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems10.1145/345014720:5(1-25)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3450147
Qu BShu JHuang YLu Y(2009)Memory Leak Dynamic Monitor Based On HOOK Technique2009 International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Software Engineering10.1109/CISE.2009.5366368(1-4)Online publication date: Dec-2009
https://doi.org/10.1109/CISE.2009.5366368
Walton SEide EEide EFiuczynski M(2007)Resource management aspects for sensor network softwareProceedings of the 4th workshop on Programming languages and operating systems10.1145/1376789.1376796(1-5)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1376789.1376796
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Efficient type and memory safety for tiny embedded systems
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Embedded and cyber-physical systems
    1. Embedded systems
  2. Real-time systems
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Software system structures
      1. Embedded software
      2. Real-time systems software

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Applications for TinyOS, a popular operating system for embedded systems and wireless sensor networks, are written in nesC, a C dialect prone to the same type and memory safety vulnerabilities as C. While availability and integrity are critical ...

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Information

Published In

PLOS '06: Proceedings of the 3rd workshop on Programming languages and operating systems: linguistic support for modern operating systems

October 2006

64 pages

ISBN:1595935770

DOI:10.1145/1215995

Conference Chair:
Christian W. Probst
Technical University of Denmark

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 22 October 2006

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ASPLOS06

Sponsor:

SIGARCH

ASPLOS06: Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems

October 22, 2006

California, San Jose

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 17 of 32 submissions, 53%

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SOSP '25

Sponsor:
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ACM SIGOPS 31st Symposium on Operating Systems Principles

October 13 - 16, 2025

Seoul , Republic of Korea

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Cited By

View all

García AMay DNutting E(2021)Integrated Hardware Garbage CollectionACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems10.1145/345014720:5(1-25)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3450147
Qu BShu JHuang YLu Y(2009)Memory Leak Dynamic Monitor Based On HOOK Technique2009 International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Software Engineering10.1109/CISE.2009.5366368(1-4)Online publication date: Dec-2009
https://doi.org/10.1109/CISE.2009.5366368
Walton SEide EEide EFiuczynski M(2007)Resource management aspects for sensor network softwareProceedings of the 4th workshop on Programming languages and operating systems10.1145/1376789.1376796(1-5)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1376789.1376796
Cooprider NArcher WEide EGay DRegehr JJha S(2007)Efficient memory safety for TinyOSProceedings of the 5th international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems10.1145/1322263.1322283(205-218)Online publication date: 6-Nov-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1322263.1322283
Archer WLevis PRegehr JAbdelzaher TGuibas LWelsh M(2007)Interface contracts for TinyOSProceedings of the 6th international conference on Information processing in sensor networks10.1145/1236360.1236382(158-165)Online publication date: 25-Apr-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1236360.1236382

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Efficient memory safety for TinyOS

Memory safety without garbage collection for embedded applications

Memory Safety for Embedded Devices with nesCheck