Skadu: Efficient vector shadow memories for poly-scopic program analysis

Shadow memory is a critical component of many dynamic program analysis frameworks with applications ranging from memory debugging to computer security. Most recent work has focused on optimizing the execution time of analyses that associate a single tag with each memory address. However, an important new class of dynamic analyses (poly-scopic analyses) requires multiple tags for each memory address. These new analyses place additional burdens on memory shadowing infrastructures, especially with regards to memory overhead. Existing shadow memory infrastructures are either unequipped to handle these additional burdens or result in runtime and memory overheads that make them impractical for all but small inputs. In this paper we propose vector shadow memories (VSMs) as an infrastructure to support poly-scopic analyses. Furthermore we introduce Skadu, a VSM implementation that employs several novel techniques to greatly reduce the runtime and memory overhead associated with the two major challenges of VSMs: tag validation and garbage collection. Our results show that on two separate poly-scopic analyses, memory footprint profiling and hierarchical critical path analysis, Skadu significantly reduces the associated memory overhead: by 14.2× and 11.4× respectively. In both cases, Skadu makes poly-scopic analysis practical for ordinary desktop and laptop machines.