Networked and Embedded Systems Laboratory

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Typical sensor nodes use resource constrained micro-controllers where user level applications, operating
system components, device drivers, etc., reside within 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. To protect against such errors, we propose a two tier software
scheme that achieves: (i) coarse grained memory protection of the operating system state, and (ii)
fine grained detection of memory corruption and subsequent recovery of application components. Coarse
grained memory protection is provided by creating and enforcing an application fault domain that restricts
the memory accesses made by an application to a portion of the address space. The operating
system state is stored outside the application fault domain and is therefore protected from memory corruption.
Fine grained memory corruption detection and recovery is provided within the application fault
domain. Memory corruption faults are detected by a run-time integrity verifier. The associated recovery
mechanism restarts only the affected application module thereby achieving a low recovery time.We have
implemented our scheme in the SOS operating system and tested it on a network of MicaZ nodes. Our
evaluation shows that the scheme effectively handles memory corruption faults while having negligible
impact on the performance and lifetime of real sensor network systems.

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