Decoupled lifeguards: enabling path optimizations for dynamic correctness checking tools

Abstract

Dynamic correctness checking tools (a.k.a. lifeguards) can detect a wide array of correctness issues, such as memory, security, and concurrency misbehavior, in unmodified executables at run time. However, lifeguards that are implemented using dynamic binary instrumentation (DBI) often slow down the monitored application by 10-50X, while proposals that replace DBI with hardware still see 3-8X slowdowns. The remaining overhead is the cost of performing the lifeguard analysis itself. In this paper, we explore compiler optimization techniques to reduce this overhead.