RepFrame: An Efficient and Transparent Framework for Dynamic Program Analysis

Dynamic program analysis frameworks greatly improve software quality as they enable a wide range of powerful analysis tools (e.g., reliability, profiling, and logging) at runtime. However, because existing frameworks run only one actual execution for each software application, the execution is fully or partially coupled with an analysis tool in order to transfer execution states (e.g., accessed memory and thread interleavings) to the analysis tool, easily causing a prohibitive slowdown for the execution. To reduce the portions of execution states that require transfer, many frameworks require significantly carving analysis tools as well as the frameworks themselves. Thus, these frameworks significantly trade off transparency with analysis tools and allow only one type of tools to run within one execution. This paper presents RepFrame, an efficient and transparent framework that fully decouples execution and analysis by constructing multiple equivalent executions. To do so, RepFrame leverages a recent fault-tolerant technique: transparent state machine replication, which runs the same software application on a set of machines (or replicas), and ensures that all replicas see the same sequence of inputs and process these inputs with the same efficient thread interleavings automatically. In addition, this paper discusses potential directions in which REPFRAME can further strengthen existing analyses. Evaluation shows that REPFRAME is easy to run two asynchronous analysis tools together and has reasonable overhead.