Toward application-aware security and reliability

Increasing complexity of computer systems and their deployment in mission- and life-critical applications, are driving the need to provide applications with security and reliability support. Application-aware checking mechanism can effectively provide knowledge about an application's characteristics to the underlying hardware, and can make attack and error checkers smarter to detect only those errors that affect the application. Such hardware-based techniques also have advantage of low overhead because the hardware modules can perform security and reliability checking in parallel with the application's execution. The security checks are indented to defend against potential security attacks by preventing malicious corruption of critical data. Meanwhile, the reliability checks are intended to detect errors in the critical variable's value, which occur due to both transient errors and software errors.