Tag Archives: 2008

Hardware Implementation of Information Flow Signatures Derived via Program Analysis

Paul Dabrowski, William Healey, Karthik Pattabiraman, Shelley Chen, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, and
Ravishankar K. Iyer, Workshop on Dependable and Secure Nanocomputing (WDSN), 2008.
[ PDF File | Talk Slides ]

Abstract: We present an architectural solution that provides trustworthy execution of C code that computes critical data, in spite of potential hardware and software vulnerabilities. The technique uses both static compiler-based analysis to generate a signature for an application, or operating system, and dynamic hardware/software signature checking. A prototype implementation of the hardware on a soft processor within an FPGA incurs no performance overhead and about 4% chip area overhead, while the software portion of the technique adds between 1% and 69% performance overhead in our test applications, depending on the selection of critical data.

Samurai: Protecting Critical Data in Unsafe Languages

Karthik Pattabiraman, Vinod Grover and Benjamin G. Zorn, Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys), 2008.
[ PDF File | Talk ]
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SymPLFIED: Symbolic Program-Level Fault Injection and Error Detection Framework

Karthik Pattabiraman, Nithin Nakka, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk and Ravishankar Iyer, Proceedings of the International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), 2008.
This paper won the William C. Carter award for the best paper at the conference
[ PDF File | Talk ]
You can find the tech report for the conference paper here.


Abstract:
This paper introduces SymPLFIED, a program-level framework which allows specification of arbitrary error detectors and the verification of their efficacy against hardware errors. SymPLFIED comprehensively enumerates all transient hardware errors in registers, memory and computation (expressed as value errors) that potentially evade detection and cause program failure. The framework uses symbolic execution to abstract the state of erroneous values in the program and model checking to comprehensively find all errors that evade detection. We demonstrate the use of SymPLFIED on a widely deployed aircraft collision avoidance application, tcas. Our results show that the SymPLFIED framework can be used to uncover hard-to-detect corner cases caused by transient errors in programs that may not be exposed by random fault-injection based validation.

The Coordinated Science Lab at UIUC did an article about this paper