REASSURE: A Self-contained Mechanism for Healing Software Using Rescue Points (original) (raw)

Software failures in server applications are a significant problem for preserving system availability. ASSURE introduced rescue points to recover software from unknown faults, while maintaining both system integrity and availability, by mimicking system behavior under known error conditions.

Rescue points are locations in existing application code for handling a given set of programmer-anticipated failures, which are automatically repurposed and tested for safely enabling fault recovery from a larger class of (unanticipated) faults.

Example of rescue point

REASSURE builds on Intel's Pin DBI framework to provide a self-containted mechanism to head software using rescue points. Rescue points can be identified and tested as before, and finally deployed using Pin and REASSURE. This new approach does not require special kernel support, and can be applied on already deployed binaries simply be installing Pin, and attaching it to the faulty application.

People

Prof. Angelos Keromytis, Columbia University
Georgios Portokalidis, Columbia University

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