Memory protection at option

Abstract

There is hardware- and software-based memory protection that can improve the dependability of software systems. The two variants vary in the degree of protection and the amount and sites of overhead. The decision for a particular mechanism therefore highly depends on the application and deployment scenario. We propose a system suited for deeply embedded systems that allows to choose among no protection, software-based protection, hardware-based protection or a combination of the two without the need to change the application. In this paper, we present the current state of this work and support our claim that the best-suited memory protection type depends on the application by a preliminary evaluation.