Parallelizing security checks on commodity hardware

• Published in: Computer architecture news 2008-03, Vol.36 (1), p.308-318
• Main Authors: Nightingale, Edmund B., Peek, Daniel, Chen, Peter M., Flinn, Jason
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0163-5964
• DOI: 10.1145/1353534.1346321

Speck (Speculative Parallel Check) is a system thataccelerates powerful security checks on commodity hardware by executing them in parallel on multiple cores. Speck provides an infrastructure that allows sequential invocations of a particular security check to run in parallel without sacrificing the safety of the system. Speck creates parallelism in two ways. First, Speck decouples a security check from an application by continuing the application, using speculative execution, while the security check executes in parallel on another core. Second, Speck creates parallelism between sequential invocations of a security check by running later checks in parallel with earlier ones. Speck provides a process-level replay system to deterministically and efficiently synchronize state between a security check and the original process.We use Speck to parallelize three security checks: sensitive data analysis, on-access virus scanning, and taint propagation. Running on a 4-core and an 8-core computer, Speck improves performance 4x and 7.5x for the sensitive data analysis check, 3.3x and 2.8x for theon-access virus scanning check, and 1.6x and 2x for the taint propagation check.