Parallelizing security checks on commodity hardware

Speck1 is a system that accelerates powerful security checks on commodity hardware by executing them in parallel on multiple cores. Speck provides an infrastructure that allows sequential invocations of a particular security check to run in parallel without sacrificing the safety of the system. Speck creates parallelism in two ways. First, Speck decouples a security check from an application by continuing the application, using speculative execution, while the security check executes in parallel on another core. Second, Speck creates parallelism between sequential invocations of a security check by running later checks in parallel with earlier ones. Speck provides a process-level replay system to deterministically and efficiently synchronize state between a security check and the original process. We use Speck to parallelize three security checks: sensitive data analysis, on-access virus scanning, and taint propagation. Running on a 4-core and an 8-core computer, Speck improves perfor...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Edmund B. Nightingale, Daniel Peek, Peter M. Chen, Jason Flinn
• Keywords: ASPLOS 2008, Programming Languages, Security Checks, Speck, Speck Creates Parallelism