[Crib-list] CRIBB Seminar -- Friday, Oct. 5, 2012 -- TIME: 12:00 Noon in Building 32, Room 141 (Stata Center) -- SPEAKER: GENE COOPERMAN (Northeastern University)

[Shirley Entzminger]

 		   COMPUTATIONAL RESEARCH in BOSTON and BEYOND SEMINAR


DATE:		FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2012
TIME:		12:00 Noon
LOCATION:	Building 32, Room 141   (Stata Center)

Pizza and beverages will be provided at 11:45 AM outside Room 32-141.


TITLE:		A History of DMTCP:
 		Checkpoint-Restart, Reversible Debugging, Virtual Machines,
 		and Cyber-Security


SPEAKER:	GENE COOPERMAN   (Northeastern University)


ABSTRACT:

DMTCP (Distributed MultiThreaded Checkpointing) is an eight-year old open 
source software project encompassing the work of about ten developers, and 
available for several popular Linux distros.  DMTCP has interesting 
parallels with virtual machines.  DMTCP's process-level checkpoints 
correspond to the snapshots of a virtual machine.

In a later enhancement, DMTCP was extended to support checkpointing of GDB 
sessions, which provided the basis for a reversible debugger.  This 
paralleled the previous work on reversible debugging via virtual machines 
(King et al., Lewis et al.).  The DMTCP-based reversible debugger (FReD: 
Fast Reversible Debugger) stands on three legs: checkpoint-restart 
(DMTCP), deterministic multi-threaded logging, and a debugger (GDB or 
other).  The deterministic logging supports multi-threaded, multi-core 
replay.  This is the basis for a module that implements a binary search in 
time for the moment when a bug first appeared.  Additional novel debugging 
strategies are planned on top of this platform.

Quite recently, DMTCP was further enhanced to checkpoint the user-mode 
Qemu virtual machine.  This enables whole-machine debugging (e.g. of 
Windows), and some interesting potential for cyber-security.  Some 
possibilities to be investigated include: rapid fuzz testing, and 
low-latency cyber-hopping.  Fuzz testing through checkpointing is 
particularly interesting for blackbox testing, in which one compares 
checkpointed memory images to quickly identify unusual memory patterns 
that may indicate potential input vulnerabilities.

******************************************************************************

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA


For more information, please visit...

 			http://math.mit.edu/crib