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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
1

Hardware-Assisted Dependable Systems

Kuvaiskii, Dmitrii 22 January 2018 (has links)
Unpredictable hardware faults and software bugs lead to application crashes, incorrect computations, unavailability of internet services, data losses, malfunctioning components, and consequently financial losses or even death of people. In particular, faults in microprocessors (CPUs) and memory corruption bugs are among the major unresolved issues of today. CPU faults may result in benign crashes and, more problematically, in silent data corruptions that can lead to catastrophic consequences, silently propagating from component to component and finally shutting down the whole system. Similarly, memory corruption bugs (memory-safety vulnerabilities) may result in a benign application crash but may also be exploited by a malicious hacker to gain control over the system or leak confidential data. Both these classes of errors are notoriously hard to detect and tolerate. Usual mitigation strategy is to apply ad-hoc local patches: checksums to protect specific computations against hardware faults and bug fixes to protect programs against known vulnerabilities. This strategy is unsatisfactory since it is prone to errors, requires significant manual effort, and protects only against anticipated faults. On the other extreme, Byzantine Fault Tolerance solutions defend against all kinds of hardware and software errors, but are inadequately expensive in terms of resources and performance overhead. In this thesis, we examine and propose five techniques to protect against hardware CPU faults and software memory-corruption bugs. All these techniques are hardware-assisted: they use recent advancements in CPU designs and modern CPU extensions. Three of these techniques target hardware CPU faults and rely on specific CPU features: ∆-encoding efficiently utilizes instruction-level parallelism of modern CPUs, Elzar re-purposes Intel AVX extensions, and HAFT builds on Intel TSX instructions. The rest two target software bugs: SGXBounds detects vulnerabilities inside Intel SGX enclaves, and “MPX Explained” analyzes the recent Intel MPX extension to protect against buffer overflow bugs. Our techniques achieve three goals: transparency, practicality, and efficiency. All our systems are implemented as compiler passes which transparently harden unmodified applications against hardware faults and software bugs. They are practical since they rely on commodity CPUs and require no specialized hardware or operating system support. Finally, they are efficient because they use hardware assistance in the form of CPU extensions to lower performance overhead.

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