Testudo: Heavyweight security analysis via statistical sampling

Heavyweight security analysis systems, such as taint analysis and dynamic type checking, are powerful technologies used to detect security vulnerabilities and software bugs. Traditional software implementations of these systems have high instrumentation overhead and suffer from significant performance impacts. To mitigate these slowdowns, a few hardware-assisted techniques have been recently proposed. However, these solutions incur a large memory overhead and require hardware platform support in the form of tagged memory systems and extended bus designs. Due to these costs and limitations, the deployment of heavyweight security analysis solutions is, as of today, limited to the research lab. In this paper, we describe Testudo, a novel hardware approach to heavyweight security analysis that is based on statistical sampling of a program’s dataflow. Our dynamic distributed debugging reduces the memory overhead to a small storage space by selectively sampling only a few tagged variabl...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: MICRO
• Authors: Joseph L. Greathouse, Ilya Wagner, David A. Ramos, Gautam Bhatnagar, Todd M. Austin, Valeria Bertacco, Seth Pettie
• Keywords: Hardware, Heavyweight Security Analysis, Memory Overhead, MICRO 2008, Security Analysis Systems