Many computer programs directly manipulate memory using unsafe pointers, which may introduce memory safety bugs. In response, past work has developed various runtime defenses, including memory safety checks, as well as mitigations like no-execute memory, shadow stacks, and control-flow integrity (CFI), which aim to prevent attackers from obtaining program control. However, software-based designs often need to update in-process runtime metadata to maximize accuracy, which is difficult to do precisely, efficiently, and securely. Hardware-based fine-grained instruction monitoring avoids this problem by maintaining metadata in special-purpose hardware, but suffers from high design complexity and requires significant microarchitectural changes.

A prototype for WPAN slicing and virtualization is showcased in this demo, where we form a contiguous wireless PAN "underlay" spanned over two neighboring IEEE 802.15.4 mote networks.