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

[Shirley Entzminger]

T O D A Y . . .


 		   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.

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA


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