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Software behaviour correlation in a redundant and diverse environment using the concept of trace abstraction

Published: 01 October 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Redundancy and diversity has been shown to be an effective approach for ensuring service continuity (an important requirement for autonomic systems) despite the presence of anomalies due to attacks or faults. In this paper, we focus on operating system (OS) diversity, which is useful in helping a system survive kernel-level anomalies. We propose an approach for detecting anomalies in the presence of OS diversity. We achieve this by comparing kernel-level traces generated from instances of the same application deployed on different OS. Our trace correlation process relies on the concept of trace abstraction, in which low-level system events are transformed into higher-level concepts, freeing the trace from OS-related events. We show the effectiveness of our approach through a case study, in which we selected Linux and FreeBSD as target OS. We also report on lessons learned, setting the ground for future research.

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        RACS '13: Proceedings of the 2013 Research in Adaptive and Convergent Systems
        October 2013
        529 pages
        ISBN:9781450323482
        DOI:10.1145/2513228
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        Published: 01 October 2013

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        Author Tags

        1. anomaly detection
        2. autonomic systems
        3. dynamic analysis
        4. redundancy and diversity
        5. trace abstraction

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        October 1 - 4, 2013
        Quebec, Montreal, Canada

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        RACS '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 73 of 317 submissions, 23%;
        Overall Acceptance Rate 393 of 1,581 submissions, 25%

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        • (2020)DepGraph: Localizing Performance Bottlenecks in Multi-Core Applications Using Waiting Dependency Graphs and Software Tracing2020 IEEE 20th International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM)10.1109/SCAM51674.2020.00022(149-159)Online publication date: Sep-2020
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        • (2018)High latency cause detection using multilevel dynamic analysis2018 Annual IEEE International Systems Conference (SysCon)10.1109/SYSCON.2018.8369613(1-8)Online publication date: Apr-2018
        • (2017)Diagnosing Performance Variations by Comparing Multi-Level Execution TracesIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2016.256739028:2(462-474)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2017
        • (2017)A declarative framework for stateful analysis of execution tracesSoftware Quality Journal10.1007/s11219-016-9311-025:1(201-229)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2017
        • (2014)Cost-benefit analysis of kernel tracing systems for forensic readinessProceedings of the 2nd international workshop on Security and forensics in communication systems10.1145/2598918.2598921(25-36)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2014

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