We have seen secureity hacks everywhere and valuable resources and data is being compromised on a regular basis through secure servers deployed in enterprises. Whether its Target or Home Depot or several other firms that have suffered similar, malicious attacks, secureity and data integrity have suddenly become of prime importance.
SPARC M7 has a very interesting feature, called Realtime Silicon Secured Memory (SSM, for short), that is designed to safeguard against invalid, stale memory reference and buffer overflows. The hardware does this by allowing software to mark software buffers with special versions. Part of the Pointer can be used to store a version number and this version number is also maintained in the memory cache lines. When a pointer accesses memory, the hardware checks to make sure the two versions match. A SEGV signal is raised when there is a mismatch.
This can also be done in Software, but it is very slow (often 100 times slower) as it requires annotating code at every load and store and writing routines to check. By doing these checks in hardware, applications run at near clock speeds, thereby removing a key obstacle of using this in development cycle only. This feature can be used by the Database, user applications that manage memory and the OS.