Will Dietz

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | UIUC · Department of Computer Science

Dynamic linking is extremely common in modern software systems, thanks to the flexibility and space savings it offers. However, this flexibility comes at a cost: it’s impossible to perform interprocedural optimizations that involve calls to a dynamic library. The basic problem is that the run-time behavior of the dynamic linker can’t be predicted a...

Managing the overwhelming complexity of software is a fundamental challenge because complexity is the root cause of problems regarding software performance, size, and security. Complexity is what makes software hard to understand, and our ability to understand software in whole or in part is essential to being able to address these problems effecti...

We describe a compiler strategy we call “Software Multiplexing” that achieves many benefits of both statically linked and dynamically linked libraries, and adds some additional advantages. Specifically, it achieves the code size benefits of dynamically linked libraries while eliminating the major disadvantages: unexpected failures due to missing de...

We present Slipstream, a userspace solution for transparently selecting efficient local transports in distributed applications written to use TCP/IP, when such applications communicate between local processes. Slipstream is easy to deploy because it is language-agnostic, automatic, and transparent. Our design in particular (1) requires no changes t...

Monolithic operating system designs undermine the security of computing systems by allowing single exploits anywhere in the kernel to enjoy full supervisor privilege. The nested kernel operating system architecture addresses this problem by "nesting" a small isolated kernel within a traditional monolithic kernel. The "nested kernel" interposes on a...

Monolithic operating system designs undermine the security of computing systems by allowing single exploits anywhere in the kernel to enjoy full supervisor privilege. The nested kernel operating system architecture addresses this problem by "nesting" a small isolated kernel within a traditional monolithic kernel. The "nested kernel" interposes on a...

Integer overflow bugs in C and C++ programs are difficult to track down and may lead to fatal errors or exploitable vulnerabilities. Although a number of tools for finding these bugs exist, the situation is complicated because not all overflows are bugs. Better tools need to be constructed— but a thorough understanding of the issues behind these er...