Computer Science Department, MS Thesis Presentation Charlie Kneissl-Williams " PACES: Exploring Pool Allocation for Embedded System Heap Security "

Charlie Kneissl-Williams

MS Student

WPI – Computer Science Department 

Tuesday, April 29, 2025 

Time: 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM 

Location: Unity Hall 471 

Advisor: Professor Robert J. Walls 

Reader: Professor Jun Dai 

Abstract : 

This paper explores PACES, a conceptual system design to implement memory pooling in embedded systems with the goal of increasing heap security. Embedded systems are commonly programmed in memory unsafe languages like C, which makes them vulnerable to memory-centric attacks through dangling and corrupted pointers. 

Type-based memory pooling has been shown to mitigate some of the risk of these attacks by ensuring that a given location will only hold one type of object but have also come with a variety of potential drawbacks.