Analyzing the behavior of running programs has a wide variety of compelling applications, from intrusion detection and prevention to bug discovery. Unfortunately, the high runtime overheads imposed by complex analysis techniques makes their deployment impractical in most settings. We present a virtual machine based architecture called Aftersight, which ameliorates this, providing a flexible and practical way to run heavyweight analyses on production workloads. We present our experience implementing Aftersight as part of the VMware virtual machine platform and using it to develop a realtime intrusion detection and prevention system, as well as an an offline system for bug detection, which we used to detect numerous novel and serious bugs in VMware ESX Server, Linux, and Windows applications.

Authors

Peter M. Chen, Jim Chow, Tal Garfinkel