Title
LDX: Causality Inference by Lightweight Dual Execution.
Abstract
Causality inference, such as dynamic taint anslysis, has many applications (e.g., information leak detection). It determines whether an event e is causally dependent on a preceding event c during execution. We develop a new causality inference engine LDX. Given an execution, it spawns a slave execution, in which it mutates c and observes whether any change is induced at e. To preclude non-determinism, LDX couples the executions by sharing syscall outcomes. To handle path differences induced by the perturbation, we develop a novel on-the-fly execution alignment scheme that maintains a counter to reflect the progress of execution. The scheme relies on program analysis and compiler transformation. LDX can effectively detect information leak and security attacks with an average overhead of 6.08% while running the master and the slave concurrently on separate CPUs, much lower than existing systems that require instruction level monitoring. Furthermore, it has much better accuracy in causality inference.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1145/2954680.2872395
ASPLOS
Keywords
Field
DocType
causality inference, dual execution, dynamic analysis
Causality,Computer science,Inference,Parallel computing,Real-time computing,Inference engine,Program analysis,Compiler transformation,Leak detection,Distributed computing
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
50
2
0163-5964
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-4091-5
1
0.35
References 
Authors
36
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yonghwi Kwon1406.53
Dohyeong Kim2459.73
Nick Sumner3161.31
Kyungtae Kim4284.20
Brendan Saltaformaggio510812.35
Xiangyu Zhang62857151.00
Dongyan Xu73158212.56