"Dr. OS: Operating system analysis, debugging and security tools based on dynamic binary translation"

计算机操作系统（OS）为用户应用提供重要服务，包括控制物理计算机硬件的共享使用，同时隐藏物理设备访问的复杂性，并保护应用（以及用户）免受其他应用的意外或恶意访问。 此外，他们必须高效地提供这些服务，并不断适应必须管理的不断变化的物理硬件和新类别应用程序不断变化的需求。 这并不奇怪，就像任何大型软件项目一样，操作系统包含错误。 然而，由于操作系统的特权地位，操作系统中的错误可能会威胁到所有应用程序和用户数据的可靠性和安全性。更令人惊讶的是，与那些广泛用于提高用户级软件应用程序质量的工具相比，操作系统开发人员可用的程序开发工具的状况很差。 动态二进制翻译（DBT）是一种功能强大的技术，它需要在执行之前监视和潜在地操纵现有程序二进制中的每条指令。在过去，它已被广泛用于开发各种分析，错误发现和用户级应用软件的安全工具。 这些工具的使用极大地提高了应用程序的性能、健壮性和安全性。不幸的是，这样的工具目前不适用于操作系统，因为没有全面的DBT框架存在的操作系统内核。出于不断增长的大小和复杂性的内核代码，其正确性的整体健壮性和整个计算机系统的安全性的重要性，以及持续流行的内核错误，尽管在静态错误检测工具的进步，我们最近开发了一个内核DBT框架。 我们的研究将提高该框架的性能，并开发工具，内核分析，调试，安全审计，和执行的安全策略。 操作系统支持所有其他用户应用程序，提高操作系统的可靠性和安全性将提高计算机系统的整体可信度。

Computer operating systems (OSs) provide vital services to user applications, including controlling the shared use of the physical computer hardware while hiding the complexity of physical device access and protecting applications (and by extention, the users) from unwanted access by other applications, whether accidental or malicious. Moreover, they must provide these services efficiently and constantly adapt to shifting physical hardware that must be managed and the changing demands of new classes of applications. It is not surprising to find that, like any large software project, operating systems contain bugs. However, due to the OS's privileged position, bugs in the OS can threaten the reliability and security of all applications and user data that have been entrusted to it. A greater surprise is the poor state of program development tools that are available to OS developers, in comparison to those widely used to improve the quality of user-level software applications. Dynamic binary translation (DBT) is a powerful technique that entails monitoring and potentially manipulating every instruction in an existing program binary just before its execution. In the past, it has been employed extensively to develop various analysis, bug-finding, and security tools for user-level application software. The use of these tools has greatly improved the performance, robustness, and security of the applications to which they have been applied. Unfortunately, such tools are currently not available for the OS since no comprehensive DBT framework exists for the OS kernel. Motivated by the ever-growing size and complexity of kernel code, the importance of its correctness for the overall robustness and security of the entire computer system, and the continued prevalence of kernel bugs despite advances in static bug-detection tools, we have recently developed an in-kernel DBT framework. Our research will enhance the performance of this framework and develop tools for kernel analysis, debugging, security auditing, and enforcement of security policies. Increasing the reliability and security of the OS, which supports all other user applications, will improve the overall trustworthiness of computer systems.