CGO 2011 Tutorial:
Building Dynamic Instrumentation Tools with DynamoRIO

Sunday afternoon, April 3, 2011, at CGO 2011 in Chamonix, France.

Audience

Researchers and professionals interested in building dynamic program analysis tools.

Abstract

This tutorial will present the DynamoRIO tool platform and describe how to use its API to build custom tools that utilize dynamic code manipulation for instrumentation, profiling, analysis, optimization, introspection, security, and more. The DynamoRIO tool platform was first released to the public in June 2002 and has since been used by many researchers to develop systems ranging from taint tracking to prefetch optimization. DynamoRIO is now publicly available in open source form. It handles large, complex, real-world applications on both Windows and Linux on the IA-32 and AMD64/Intel-64 platforms.

The first part of the tutorial will consist of presentations that describe the full range of DynamoRIO's powerful API, which abstracts away the details of the underlying infrastructure and allows the tool builder to concentrate on analyzing or modifying the application's runtime code stream. We will give many examples and highlight differences between DynamoRIO and other tool platforms. We will also seek feedback on how we can improve the DynamoRIO API.

The second part of the tutorial will include lab sessions where attendees experiment with building their own tools using DynamoRIO. Attendees for should bring a laptop with a Linux or Windows development environment: gcc on Linux, Visual Studio on Windows, as well as CMake (which can be installed at the tutorial if necessary).

Topics

DynamoRIO API
- Observe and modify runtime code stream
- Insert call-outs to high-level code, inline operations, or re-arrange and replace code at ISA level
- Event system for thread, library, fault, system call, etc. operations
- Cross-platform transparency support
- Application inspection
- Powerful IA-32/AMD64 instruction representation for disassembly, decoding, encoding, and manipulation of instructions.
- Support for translation in presence of code modifications
Example tools, both small and large
Advanced topics when building sophisticated tools
Lab sessions where attendees will build their own tools

Organizers

Derek Bruening is the primary author of the DynamoRIO tool platform. Derek is a Software Engineer at Google where he works on the Dr. Memory memory debugging tool, which is built on top of DynamoRIO. Previously he built DynamoRIO-based tools at VMware and co-founded Determina, whose Memory Firewall security technology was based on DynamoRIO. Derek holds a PhD and MEng from MIT.

Qin Zhao is a post-doctoral researcher at MIT. He holds a PhD from NUS (National University of Singapore). He has built several large tools and frameworks with DynamoRIO, including the debugging framework EDDI and parallel memory profiler and analyzer PiPA.

Questions

Questions about the tutorial can be sent to the DynamoRIO-Users mailing list.