Standard benchmarking provides to run-times for given programs on given machines, but fails to provide insight as to why those results were obtained (either in terms of machine or program characteristics) and fails to provide run-times for that program on some other machine, or some other programs on that machine. We have developed a machine-imdependent model of program execution to characterize both machine performance and program execution. By merging these machine and program characterizations, we can estimate execution time for arbitrary machine/program combinations. Our technique allows us to identify those operations, either on the machine or in the programs, which dominate the benchmark results. This information helps designers in improving the performance of future machines and users in tuning their applications to better utilize the performance of existing machines. Here we apply our methodology to characterize benchmarks and predict their execution times. We present extensive run-time statistics for a large set of benchmarks including the SPEC and Perfect Club suites. We show how these statistics can be used to identify important shortcoming in the programs. In addition, we give execution time estimates for a large sample of programs and machines and compare these against benchmark results. Finally, we develop a metric for program similarity that makes it possible to classify benchmarks with respect to a large set of characteristics.

Analysis of benchmark characteristics and benchmark performance prediction

http://cs.slu.edu/~fritts/papers/micpro_mb2video.pdf

MediaBench II video: Expediting the next generation of video systems research

This paper presents a mechanism to dynamically detect the loops that are executed in a program. This technique detects the beginning and the termination of the iterations and executions of the loops without compiler/user intervention. We propose to apply this dynamic loop detection to the speculation of multiple threads of control dynamically obtained from a sequential program. Based an the highly predictable behavior of the loops, the history of the past executed loops is used to speculate the future instruction sequence. The overall objective is to dynamically obtain coarse grain parallelism (at the thread level) that can be exploited by a multithreaded architecture. We show that for a 4-context multithreaded processor the speculation mechanism provides around 2.6 concurrent threads in average.

/pdf/control-speculation-in-multithreaded-processors-through-3oz7o5b9h8.pdf

Control speculation in multithreaded processors through dynamic loop detection

Analyzing cryptographic implementations has important applications, especially for malware analysis where they are an integral part both of the malware payload and the unpacking code that decrypts this payload. These implementations are often based on well-known cryptographic functions, whose description is publicly available. While potentially very useful for malware analysis, the identification of such cryptographic primitives is made difficult by the fact that they are usually obfuscated. Current state-of-the-art identification tools are ineffective due to the absence of easily identifiable static features in obfuscated code. However, these implementations still maintain the input-output (I/O) relationship of the original function. In this paper, we present a tool that leverages this fact to identify cryptographic functions in obfuscated programs, by retrieving their I/O parameters in an implementation-independent fashion, and comparing them with those of known cryptographic functions. In experimental evaluation, we successfully identified the cryptographic functions TEA, RC4, AES and MD5 both in synthetic examples protected by a commercial-grade packer (AsProtect), and in several obfuscated malware samples (Sality, Waledac, Storm Worm and SilentBanker). In addition, our tool was able to recognize basic operations done in asymmetric ciphers such as RSA.

https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00762924/document

Aligot: cryptographic function identification in obfuscated binary programs

https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dawnsong/papers/2012%20Automatic%20Protocol%20Reverse%20Engineering.pdf

Automatic protocol reverse-engineering: Message format extraction and field semantics inference

Loops are directly defined on an instruction execution string rather than on a directed graph model of a program derived from the source code. A simple efficient algorithm to find the loops and subloops thus defined is presented.

Kobayashi

Papers

Dynamic Characteristics of Loops