An approach to error correction in program code using dynamic optimization in a virtual execution environment

Program code is at risk from a wide range of attack vectors that appear at various stages during the compilation and execution of machine code. The existing approaches for detecting threats in program code have many restrictions in terms of their functionality and the types of threats that can be identified. The paper proposes an approach for detecting timing channels in program code based on just-in-time compilation in a virtual execution environment. Annotations of code permit the management of analyses and transformations. The virtual environment uses both static and dynamic analyses of the intermediate representation of the code and re-compiles such code to be safe. The language of annotations allows us to formulate rules for the detection of timing channels and to manage the amount of time spent on such analyses by adapting the precision of these analyses. The results demonstrate that unlike static compilation of program code, our approach dynamically analyses and transforms large sizes of code in real time. They also demonstrate that the virtual execution environment that uses the proposed approach is efficient.