DualGuard: Comprehensive and Efficient Memory Safety across Sequential and Speculative Execution

Abstract

Although decades of research have yielded sophisticated mechanisms for enforcing memory safety, speculative execution can subvert these protections through transient memory operations. Conversely, defenses designed specifically for speculative safety, such as Speculative Load Hardening (SLH), cannot enforce memory safety during non-speculative execution. A naive combination of defenses from both domains raises two fundamental challenges: (1) which combination of otherwise fragmented defenses can ensure dual memory safety under speculative and non-speculative executions? (2) whether such combinations introduce redundant protections that incur unnecessary performance overhead? We present DualGuard, a unified framework for dual memory protection under non-speculative and speculative executions. DualGuard systematically analyzes memory behaviors, classifying them into four categories, and further identifies the minimal composition requirements for dual memory safety, which allow us to strategically combine existing mitigations and design new ones to avoid redundant or excessive protections. We implement DualGuard through a combination of static analysis and runtime enforcement within the LLVM infrastructure. Our evaluation demonstrates that DualGuard reduces overhead by 3%-72% compared to naive compositions of fragmented defenses. In some cases, it even incurs lower overhead than approaches that guarantee memory safety solely under either non-speculative or speculative execution.