Memory Protections: Auditing and Testing

[makubacki]

This issue tracks work related to auditing and testing memory protections.

### Configuration tasks
- [ ] https://github.com/tianocore/projects/issues/19
- [ ] https://github.com/tianocore/projects/issues/20
- [ ] https://github.com/tianocore/projects/issues/31
- [ ] https://github.com/tianocore/projects/issues/33

[niruiyu]

What's the diff between "auditing" and "verification"?

[makubacki]

What's the diff between "auditing" and "verification"?

I tried to avoid "verification" in this task list and focus on "auditing" vs "testing".

• Auditing

  • Audits allow a systematic examination of memory protections to ensure they adhere to the guidelines we've defined. For example, audits may produce collateral (such as a memory paging report) that is consumed by a human or machine to assess that a given platform's unique memory requirements are addressed and protected properly by the memory protection mechanisms in place.

• Testing

  • Follows its traditional definition. In the context of this task list, these would be applications/drivers that seek to identify defects or errors in memory protection code implementation and/or confirm that the implementation meets requirements it was written against.
  • An example would be an EFI application that checks if NULL pointer detection is enabled, violates the protection, and then confirms it was caught in an exception handler.