Although x86 processors have been around for a long time and are the most ubiquitous processors in the world, the amount of academic research regarding details of their performance has been minimal. Here, we introduce an x86 simulation environment, called TAXI (Trace Analysis for X86 Interpretation), and use it to present some results for eight Win32 applications. In this paper, we explain the ...

CodeSurfer/x86 is a prototype system for analyzing x86 executables. It uses a static-analysis algorithm called value-set analysis (VSA) to recover intermediate representations that are similar to those that a compiler creates for a program written in a high-level language. A major challenge in building an analysis tool for executables is in providing useful information about operations involvin...

Trace compilation is a technique used by just-in-time (JIT) compilers such as TraceMonkey, the JavaScript engine in the Mozilla Firefox browser. Contrary to traditional JIT machines, a trace compiler works on only part of the source program, normally a linear path inside a heavily executed loop. Because the trace is compiled during the interpretation of the source program the JIT compiler has a...

Although x86 processors have been around for a long time and are the most ubiquitous processors in the world, the amount of academic research regarding details of their performance has been minimal. Here, we will introduce x86 simulation environment, which we call Trace Analysis for X86 Interpretation, or TAXI, and use it to discuss the differences between current x86 processors and other proce...

Shor’s factoring algorithm uses two quantum registers. By introducing more registers we show that the measured numbers in these registers which are of the same pre-measurement state, should be equal if the original Shor’s complexity argument is sound. This contradicts the argument that the second register has r possible measured values. There is an anonymous comment which argues that the states...

This work describes the porting of Hyperkernel, an x86 kernel, to the ARMv8-A architecture. Hyperkernel was created to demonstrate various OS design decisions that are amenable to push-button verification. Hyperkernel simplifies reasoning about virtual memory by separating the kernel and user address spaces. In addition, Hyperkernel adopts an exokernel design to minimize code complexity, and th...

Control-flow hijack attacks remain a major security problem, despite many years of research aimed at mitigating them. Code-Pointer Integrity (CPI) [2] is the first protection mechanism that systematically prevents all such attacks while keeping performance overhead low. In the upcoming S&P’15 paper, Evans et al. [1] claim that CPI can be bypassed on x86-64 and ARM architectures. This poster is ...

Techniques for aggressive optimization and parallelization of applications can have the side-effect of introducing copy instructions, register-to-register move instructions, into the generated code. This preserves program correctness while avoiding the need for global searchand-update of registers. However, copy instructions only transfer data between registers while requiring the use of system...

Let a be an l-sequence generated by a feedback-with-carry shift register with connection integer q = pe, where p is an odd prime and e 1. Goresky and Klapper conjectured that when pe = 2 f5; 9; 11; 13g, all decimations of a are cyclically distinct. When e = 1 and p > 13, they showed that the set of distinct decimations is large and, in some cases, all deciamtions are distinct. In this article, ...