Design and Implementation of a Dynamic Instrumentation Framework based on Light-weight Dynamic Binary Translation

Jeehong Kim, Dongwoo Lee, Inhyeok Kim, Young Ik Eom

http://doi.org/

Dynamic binary instrumentation is a code insertion technique for debugging a program without scattering its execution flow, while the program is running. Most dynamic instrumentations are implemented using dynamic binary translation techniques. Existing studies translated program codes dynamically by parsing the machine code stream to intermediate representation (IR) and then applying compilation techniques for IRs. However, they have high overhead during translation, which is a major cause of difficulty in applying the dynamic binary translation technique to the program which requires high responsiveness. In this paper, we introduce a light-weight dynamic binary instrumentation framework based on a novel dynamic binary translation technique which has low overhead while translating the program code. In order to reduce the translation overhead, our approach adopts a tabular-based address translation and exploits a translation bypassing scheme, which stores the translated address of a frequently called library function in advance. It then accesses the translated address and executes function codes without code translation when calling the function. Our experiment results demonstrated that the proposed approach outperforms the prior dynamic binary translation techniques from 2% up to 65%.