Memory-based attacks represent one of the largest attack classes in the field.
Many techniques have been proposed to protect applications from certain
classes of memory exploits, however, few of these techniques can protect the
application from all memory attacks, and few permit the protection of only
select variables. We present a technique to provide protection of select
variables from a wide range of memory attacks. The protection is provided by
computing the dependence tree of each critical variable, ensuring that no
variable or instruction within the dependence tree is corrupted by utilizing
hardware supported runtime checks. We evaluate the technique using software
based emulation.