Biblio

Localizing concurrency faults that occur in production is hard because, (1) detailed field data, such as user input, file content and interleaving schedule, may not be available to developers to reproduce the failure; (2) it is often impractical to assume the availability of multiple failing executions to localize the faults using existing techniques; (3) it is challenging to search for buggy locations in an application given limited runtime data; and, (4) concurrency failures at the system level often involve multiple processes or event handlers (e.g., software signals), which can not be handled by existing tools for diagnosing intra-process(thread-level) failures. To address these problems, we present SCMiner, a practical online bug diagnosis tool to help developers understand how a system-level concurrency fault happens based on the logs collected by the default system audit tools. SCMiner achieves online bug diagnosis to obviate the need for offline bug reproduction. SCMiner does not require code instrumentation on the production system or rely on the assumption of the availability of multiple failing executions. Specifically, after the system call traces are collected, SCMiner uses data mining and statistical anomaly detection techniques to identify the failure-inducing system call sequences. It then maps each abnormal sequence to specific application functions. We have conducted an empirical study on 19 real-world benchmarks. The results show that SCMiner is both effective and efficient at localizing system-level concurrency faults.

Cloud storage backends such as Amazon S3 are a potential storage solution to enterprises. However, to couple enterprises with these backends, at least two problems must be solved: first, how to make these semi-trusted backends as secure as on-premises storage; and second, how to selectively retrieve files as easy as on-premises storage. A security proxy can address both the problems by building a local index from keywords in files before encrypting and uploading files to these backends. But, if the local index is built in plaintext, file content is still vulnerable to local malicious staff. Searchable Encryption (SE) can get rid of this vulnerability by making index into ciphertext; however, its known constructions often require modifications to index database, and, to support wildcard queries, they are not efficient at all. In this paper, we present a security proxy that, based on our wildcard SE construction, can securely and efficiently couple enterprises with these backends. In particular, since our SE construction can work directly with existing database systems, it incurs only a little overhead, and when needed, permits the security proxy to run with constantly small storage footprint by readily out-sourcing all built indices to existing cloud databases.