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Optimistic Hybrid Analysis for System Security and Reliability

Series: Department Seminar

Speaker: Prof. Satish Narayanasamy University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA

Date/Time: Dec 11 10:30:00

Location: CSA Seminar Hall (Room No. 254, First Floor)

Faculty Advisor:

Abstract:
Dynamic analysis tools such as information-flow tracking (DIFT) and data-race detection are useful for enforcing security policies and improving software reliability. But these tools are rarely used in production systems, as it can slow down a program by an order of magnitude. Static whole program analyses can be used to prove safe execution states and elide unnecessary runtime checks, but in practice, they are mostly ineffective for large programs. The reason is that they are greatly hindered by the need to prove their soundness, as soundness requires analysis of all possible executions and sound over-approximations of a program. This talk presents Optimistic Hybrid Analysis (OHA). OHA improves the scalability and precision of whole program static analysis by one to two orders of magnitude by making optimistic assumptions about a program’s properties that are almost always true, but are hard to prove statically. By making these assumptions, we sacrifice soundness of static analysis, but yet, we preserve soundness of dynamic analysis by checking them at runtime and recovering when they fail. OHA has been used to obtain three promising results. It speeds up FastTrack, a well-known dynamic data-race detector by 3.5x; reduces the overhead of DIFT to less than 10%, a 4.4x improvement; enables the first known solution for a sound garbage collector for C/C++ using efficient pointer provenance.

Speaker Bio:
Satish Narayanasamy is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan. He is also the CEO of Sequal Inc., a precision health startup. His research interests are in parallel computer architecture and program analysis, and more recently, systems for health. His research led to the development of several tools, some of which are now used in practice such as PinPlay at Intel. His research has been recognized through several awards, including an NSF CAREER award, best paper awards at ASPLOS and ISPASS, and four IEEE Micro Top Picks awards. He was a Morris Wellman Faculty Development Professor.

Host Faculty: Arkaprava Basu