The University of British Columbia

Two trends - the increasing complexity of computer systems and their deployment in mission- and life-critical applications - are driving the need to provide applications with security and reliability support. Compounding the situation, the Internet's ubiquity has made systems much more vulnerable to malicious attacks that can have far-reaching implications on our daily lives. Clearly, the traditional one-size-fits-all approach to security and reliability is no longer sufficient or acceptable from the user perspective. In this article, we introduce the concept of application-aware checking as an alternative. By extracting application via recent breakthroughs in compiler analysis and enforcing the characteristics at runtime with the hardware modules embedded in the reliability and security engine (RSE), it's possible to achieve security and reliability with low overheads and false-positive rates