Re: Connecting Nick and Kangjie

Re: Connecting Nick and Kangjie

[Nick Desaulniers]

On Wed, Sep 28, 2022 at 3:37 PM Navid Emamdoost <navidem@google.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Kangjie,
>
> I hope you are doing well. I wanted to introduce you to Nick who is working on very interesting projects at Google for the Clang-built kernels. He came across your CCS paper on identifying indirect calls targets, and was interested to know about more of your work.
>
> Nick,
> Kangjie was on my PhD committee and we published a couple papers on detecting resource release bugs in the Linux kernel. Hope you can find interesting topics to collaborate on. Please feel free to keep me in the loop.

Naveed, many thanks for the introduction.

Professor,
My colleague, Nathan, recently pointed me to
https://github.com/umnsec/mlta which I was unfamiliar with.  I've been
driving the effort to get the kernel buildable with clang for the past
~6 years, to help facilitate such academic research as this.  `asm
goto` support landed in clang-9, and has been a major focus of my work
in LLVM in particular.  Seeing the difficulties with them mentioned in
section 5.1 of https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~kjlu/papers/mlta.pdf
gave me a chuckle (a sad one...it's been a long painful journey).

I was wondering if you would be able to stop by a public virtual
meeting we host once every 2 weeks and give a quick (~15 minute)
presentation on MLTA?
https://clangbuiltlinux.github.io/ has the Google Meet and Calendar
links. The next instance would be Wednesday next week at noon Pacific.

In particular, I'm also curious if you have additional research
underway involving the combination of LLVM and the Linux kernel?
-- 
Thanks,
~Nick Desaulniers

Re: Connecting Nick and Kangjie

[Kangjie Lu]

Hi Navid and Nick,

Glad to hear from you!

On Wed, Sep 28, 2022 at 5:50 PM Nick Desaulniers
<ndesaulniers@google.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Sep 28, 2022 at 3:37 PM Navid Emamdoost <navidem@google.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi Kangjie,
> >
> > I hope you are doing well. I wanted to introduce you to Nick who is working on very interesting projects at Google for the Clang-built kernels. He came across your CCS paper on identifying indirect calls targets, and was interested to know about more of your work.
> >
> > Nick,
> > Kangjie was on my PhD committee and we published a couple papers on detecting resource release bugs in the Linux kernel. Hope you can find interesting topics to collaborate on. Please feel free to keep me in the loop.
>
> Naveed, many thanks for the introduction.
>
> Professor,
> My colleague, Nathan, recently pointed me to
> https://github.com/umnsec/mlta which I was unfamiliar with.  I've been
> driving the effort to get the kernel buildable with clang for the past
> ~6 years, to help facilitate such academic research as this.  `asm
> goto` support landed in clang-9, and has been a major focus of my work
> in LLVM in particular.  Seeing the difficulties with them mentioned in
> section 5.1 of https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~kjlu/papers/mlta.pdf
> gave me a chuckle (a sad one...it's been a long painful journey).

After the MLTA work, I was amazed to find that Linux was fully
compilable with Clang. Now I realized someone is striving to make this
happen :)  Thanks!

>
> I was wondering if you would be able to stop by a public virtual
> meeting we host once every 2 weeks and give a quick (~15 minute)
> presentation on MLTA?
> https://clangbuiltlinux.github.io/ has the Google Meet and Calendar
> links. The next instance would be Wednesday next week at noon Pacific.

I'd love to. The best time for me is the one following next week
(10/19). Anytime before noon or after 2pm PST should work for me.

>
> In particular, I'm also curious if you have additional research
> underway involving the combination of LLVM and the Linux kernel?

We do have ongoing research that is involving both LLVM and Linux, but
it is purely for analysis and code hardening, not for bug finding. For
example, we recently finished another follow-up work of MLTA and are
able to further remove 40% of indirect-call targets in the Linux
kernel.


Best regards,
Kangjie



> --
> Thanks,
> ~Nick Desaulniers



-- 
Kangjie Lu
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Minnesota
https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~kjlu