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Speculative execution which is used pervasively in modern CPUs can leave side effects in the processor caches and other structures even when the speculated instructions do not commit and their direct effect is not visible. The recent…
Monitoring kernel object modification of virtual machine is widely used by virtual-machine-introspection-based security monitors to protect virtual machines in cloud computing, such as monitoring dentry objects to intercept file operations,…
The Linux kernel is highly-configurable, with a build system that takes a configuration file as input and automatically tailors the source code accordingly. Configurability, however, complicates testing, because different configuration…
We present a parallel profiling tool, GAPP, that identifies serialization bottlenecks in parallel Linux applications arising from load imbalance or contention for shared resources . It works by tracing kernel context switch events using…
The application layer of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a growing source of security vulnerabilities, as developers often neglect to implement critical protections such as encryption, authentication, and freshness. While formal verification…
Simultaneously supporting latency- and throughout-sensitive workloads in a shared environment is an increasingly more common challenge in big data clusters. Despite many advances, existing cluster schedulers force the same performance goal…
The remote procedure call (a.k.a. RPC) latency becomes increasingly significant in a distributed file system. We propose BuffetFS, a user-level file system that optimizes I/O performance by eliminating the RPCs caused by \texttt{open()}…
Linux systems are integral to the infrastructure of modern computing environments, necessitating robust security measures to prevent unauthorized access. Privilege escalation attacks represent a significant threat, typically allowing…
Today, network devices share buffer across priority queues to avoid drops during transient congestion. While cost-effective most of the time, this sharing can cause undesired interference among seemingly independent traffic. As a result,…
Internet of Things is growing rapidly, with many connected devices now available to consumers. With this growth, the IoT apps that manage the devices from smartphones raise significant security concerns. Typically, these apps are secured…
Unikernels, an evolution of LibOSs, are emerging as a virtualization technology to rival those currently used by cloud providers. Unikernels combine the user and kernel space into one "uni"fied memory space and omit functionality that is…
Maliciously prepared software packages are an extensively leveraged weapon for software supply chain attacks. The detection of malicious packages is undoubtedly of high priority and many academic and commercial approaches have been…
Unix competence is the ability to use shell and operating-system primitives as first-class tools, not merely to write programs through a terminal. Current terminal benchmarks tend to blur this distinction: a solver fluent in Python but weak…
Linux kernel vulnerability reproduction is a critical task in system security. To reproduce a kernel vulnerability, the vulnerable environment and the Proof of Concept (PoC) program are needed. Most existing research focuses on the…
Large language model fine-tuning APIs enable widespread model customization, yet pose significant safety risks. Recent work shows that adversaries can exploit access to these APIs to bypass model safety mechanisms by encoding harmful…
The Linux kernel source code contains numerous constant values that critically influence system performance. Many of these constants, which we term perf-consts, are magic numbers that encode brittle assumptions about hardware and workloads.…
Spectre v1 attacks, which exploit conditional branch misprediction, are often identified with attacks that bypass array bounds checking to leak data from a victim's memory. Generally, however, Spectre v1 attacks can exploit any conditional…
The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the most important protocols in today's Internet. Its specification and implementations have been refined for almost forty years. The Linux TCP stack is one of the most widely used TCP…
Foreign Function Interfaces (FFIs) are essential for enabling interoperability between programming languages, yet existing FFI solutions are ill-suited for the dynamic, interactive workflows prevalent in modern notebook environments such as…
Modern computing systems are limited in performance by the memory bandwidth available to processors, a problem known as the memory wall. Processing-in-Memory (PIM) promises to substantially improve this problem by moving processing closer…