STEFANO CARNÀ

Dottore di ricerca

ciclo: XXXIV


supervisore: Francesco Quaglia

Titolo della tesi: Methodologies and techniques for on-line exploitation of Performance Monitor Units in modern computing systems

We are living in a hot period in which the intense competition among chipmakers is turning into an explosion of new hardware-level features. Among the innovations, modern processors embed a hardware support able to identify the footprint on the hardware caused by the execution of software. In this thesis, we propose novel techniques to leverage the Performance Monitor Units (PMUs) hardware facilities offered by modern off-the-shelf CPUs to gather hardware-level footprint data at runtime, and exploit this information on-the fly. Our solutions aim to collect hardware-level information while minimizing the perturbation experienced by the software applications and foster its online analysis and exploitation. Throughout this thesis, we show how our methodology can be employed to address different problems in different domains. In particular, we provide the operating system with a module to master this integrated hardware support in order to perform dynamic corrective operations in malware detection, CPU-scheduling consolidation and functional hardware-accelerated tasks. Moreover, working at the lowest software layer has the extra benefit of enforcing the transparency property of our approach, strengthening both the adaptability and the dependability of the whole solution. Beyond demonstrating how PMUs can be exploited for security, performance and functional activities, in this thesis we, additionally present our profiling infrastructure, which implements versatile mechanisms for the exploitation of PMUs in modern contexts.

Produzione scientifica

11573/1652448 - 2022 - Fight Hardware with Hardware: System-wide Detection and Mitigation of Side-Channel Attacks using Performance Counters
Carna', Stefano; Ferracci, Serena; Quaglia, Francesco; Pellegrini, Alessandro - 01a Articolo in rivista
rivista: DIGITAL THREATS (New York NY: Association for Computing Machinery, [2020]-) pp. - - issn: 2692-1626 - wos: (0) - scopus: 2-s2.0-85152897415 (2)

11573/1487281 - 2020 - Reproducibility Report for the Paper: Partial Evaluation via Code Generation for Static Stochastic Reaction Network Models
Carna', Stefano - 04b Atto di convegno in volume
congresso: 2020 ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation, SIGSIM-PADS 2020 (Miami; USA)
libro: SIGSIM-PADS 2020 - Proceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation - (9781450375924)

11573/1487750 - 2020 - Don’t be Paranoid: Dynamic Detection and Mitigation for Threats Exploiting Cache-based Side-channel Attacks
Carna', Stefano; Ferracci, Serena; Quaglia, Francesco; Pellegrini, Alessandro - 02a Capitolo o Articolo
libro: ACACES 2020, Poster Abstracts - (9789078427001)

11573/1349056 - 2019 - Hardware-assisted Incremental Checkpointing in Speculative Parallel Discrete Event Simulation
Carna', Stefano; Ferracci, Serena; De Santis, Emanuele; Pellegrini, Alessandro; Quaglia, Francesco - 04b Atto di convegno in volume
congresso: 2019 Winter Simulation Conference, WSC 2019 (National Harbor; United States)
libro: 2019 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC) - (978-1-7281-3283-9)

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