Software Based Memory Protection in Sensor Nodes

In Third Workshop on Embedded Networked Sensors (EmNets 2006) , 5 pages , May 2006.

NESL Technical Report #: TR-UCLA-NESL-200603-01

Typical sensor nodes are resource constrained microcontrollers containing user level applications, operating system components, and device drivers in a single address space, with no form of memory protection. A programming error in an application can easily corrupt the state of the operating system and other software components on the node. In this paper, we propose a memory protection scheme that prevents the corruption of operating system state by buggy applications.We use sandboxing to restrict application memory accesses within the address space. Severe resource constraints on the sensor node present interesting challenges in designing a sandbox for user applications.We have implemented and tested our scheme on the SOS operating system. Our experiments were able to detect a memory corruption bug in an application module that had been in use for several months.

• Ramkumar Rengaswamy
• Eddie Kohler
• Mani B Srivastava

• PDF file of paper

• SOS : A dynamic operating system for sensor networks

Conference Paper