Dynamic program analysis of Microsoft Windows applications

—Software instrumentation is a powerful and flexible technique for analyzing the dynamic behavior of programs. By inserting extra code in an application, it is possible to study the performance and correctness of programs and systems. Pin is a software system that performs run-time binary instrumentation of unmodified applications. Pin provides an API for writing custom instrumentation, enabling its use in a wide variety of performance analysis tasks such as workload characterization, program tracing, cache modeling, and simulation. Most of the prior work on instrumentation systems has focused on executing Unix applications, despite the ubiquity and importance of Windows applications. This paper identifies the Windows-specific obstacles for implementing a process-level instrumentation system, describes a comprehensive, robust solution, and discusses some of the alternatives. The challenges lie in managing the kernel/application transitions, injecting the runtime agent into the pr...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ISPASS
• Authors: Alex Skaletsky, Tevi Devor, Nadav Chachmon, Robert S. Cohn, Kim M. Hazelwood, Vladimir Vladimirov, Moshe Bach
• Keywords: Instrumentation, Instrumentation System, ISPASS 2010, Run-time Binary Instrumentation, Software Engineering