Automatic Multi-Thread Code Generation for Monitoring Signature-based Control Flow

Abstract

Signature-based control flow monitoring is a representative technique for detecting control flow errors in run time. However, it is very inefficient and time consuming to manually insert the monitoring code into a monitor-target application. In particular, for performance improvements of control-flow monitoring, implementing a monitoring code that operates in multi-thread makes things more complicated. In this paper, we propose an automatic code-generation framework that automatically translate an application into the control-flow monitorable application. In the proposed framework, the applied technique for control-flow monitoring is based on separate signature-based control-flow monitoring (SSCFM) technique that is able to expect performance improvements in multi-threaded or multi-core environments by separating the signature update and the signature verification on the thread level. The proposed framework automatically analyzes a monitor-target application and generates a SSCFM-applied application based on the analysis results. We anticipate that our automatic multi-thread code generation framework for control flow monitoring lessens the burden in runtime control-flow monitoring field.