Fay: extensible distributed tracing from kernels to clusters
SOSP '11 Proceedings of the Twenty-Third ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
Trends and challenges in operating systems---from parallel computing to cloud computing
Concurrency and Computation: Practice & Experience
Fay: Extensible Distributed Tracing from Kernels to Clusters
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
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For a long time, dynamic tracing has been an enabling technique for reverse engineering tools. Tracing can not only be used to record the control flow of a particular component such as a piece of malware itself, it is also a way to analyze the interactions of a component and their impact on the rest of the system. Unlike Unix-based systems, for which several dynamic tracing tools are available, Windows has been lacking appropriate tools. From a reverse engineering perspective, however, Windows may be considered the most relevant OS, particularly with respect to malware analysis. In this paper, we present NTrace, a dynamic tracing tool for the Windows kernel, drivers, system libraries, and applications that supports function boundary tracing. NTrace incorporates 2 novel approaches: (1) a way to integrate with Windows Structured Exception Handling and (2) a technique to instrument binary code on IA-32 architectures that is both safe and more efficient than DTrace.