In recent years, dynamic program analysis (DPA) has been widely used in various fields such as profiling, finding bugs, and security. However, existing solutions have their own weaknesses. Software solutions provide flexibility in DPA but they suffer from tremendous performance overhead. In contrast, core-level hardware engines rely on specialized integrated logics and attain extremely fast computation, but they have a limited functional extensibility because the logics are tightly coupled with the host processor. To mend this, a prior system-level approach utilizes an existing channel to integrate their hardware without necessitating the host architecture modification and introduced great potential in performance. Nevertheless, the prior work does not address the detailed design and implementation of the engine, which is quite essential to leverage the deployment on real systems. To address this, in this article, we propose an implementation of programmable DPA hardware engine, called program analysis unit (PAU). PAU is an application-specific instruction-set processor (ASIP) whose instruction set is customized to reflect common features of various DPA methods. With the specialized architecture and programmability of software, our PAU aims at fast computation and sufficient flexibility. In our case studies on several DPA techniques, we show that our ASIP approach can be successfully applicable to complex DPA schemes while providing hardware-backed power in performance and software-based flexibility in analysis. Recent experiments on our FPGA prototype revealed that the performance of PAU is 4.7-13.6 times faster than pure software DPA, and the power/area consumption is also acceptably small compared to today's mobile processors. . 2015. Implementing an application-specific instruction-set processor for system-level dynamic program analysis engines.
Abstract. In this paper, we propose a Lightweight Internet Permit System (LIPS) that provides a lightweight, scalable packet authentication mechanism for ensuring traffic-origin accountability. LIPS is a simple extension of IP, in which each packet carries an access permit issued by its destination host or gateway, and the destination verifies the access permit to determine if a packet is accepted or dropped. We will first present the design and the prototype implementation of LIPS on Linux 2.4 kernel. We then use analysis, simulations, and experiments to show how LIPS can effectively prevent protected critical servers and links from being flooded by unwanted packets with negligible overheads. We propose LIPS as an domain-to-domain approach to stop unwanted attacks, without requiring broad changes in backbone networks as other approaches. Therefore, LIPS is incrementally deployable in a large scale on common platforms with minor software patches.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.