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2. To Stack or Not To Stack

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3. Scan Stack: A Search-based Concurrent Stack for GPU

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4. Stack-Aware Hyperproperties

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30823-9_16  

   Bajwa, Ali; Zhang, Minjian; Chadha, Rohit; Viswanathan, Mahesh (January 2023, Springer Nature Switzerland)

   Abstract A hyperproperty relates executions of a program and is used to formalize security objectives such as confidentiality, non-interference, privacy, and anonymity. Formally, a hyperproperty is a collection of allowable sets of executions. A program violates a hyperproperty if the set of its executions is not in the collection specified by the hyperproperty. The logicHyperCTL*has been proposed in the literature to formally specify and verify hyperproperties. The problem of checking whether a finite-state program satisfies aHyperCTL*formula is known to be decidable. However, the problem turns out to be undecidable for procedural (recursive) programs. Surprisingly, we show that decidability can be restored if we consider restricted classes of hyperproperties, namely those that relate only those executions of a program which have the same call-stack access pattern. We call such hyperproperties,stack-aware hyperproperties.Our decision procedure can be used as a proof method for establishing security objectives such as noninference for recursive programs, and also for refuting security objectives such as observational determinism. Further, if the call stack size is observable to the attacker, the decision procedure provides exact verification. 

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5. Z-Stack: A High-Performance DPDK-Based Zero-Copy TCP/IP Protocol Stack

   https://doi.org/10.1109/LANMAN61958.2024.10621881  

   Narappa, Anvaya B; Parola, Federico; Qi, Shixiong; Ramakrishnan, K K (July 2024, IEEE)

   Data centers require high-performance and efficient networking for fast and reliable communication between applications. TCP/IP-based networking still plays a dominant role in data center networking to support a wide range of Layer-4 and Layer-7 applications, such as middleboxes and cloud-based microservices. However, traditional kernel-based TCP/IP stacks face performance challenges due to overheads such as context switching, interrupts, and copying. We present Z-stack, a high-performance userspace TCP/IP stack with a zero-copy design. Utilizing DPDK's Poll Mode Driver, Z-stack bypasses the kernel and moves packets between the NIC and the protocol stack in userspace, eliminating the overhead associated with kernel-based processing. Z-stack em-ploys polling-based packet processing that improves performance under high loads, and eliminates receive livelocks compared to interrupt-driven packet processing. With its zero-copy socket design, Z-stack eliminates copies when moving data between the user application and the protocol stack, which further minimizes latency and improves throughput. In addition, Z-stack seamlessly integrates with shared memory processing within the node, eliminating duplicate protocol processing and serializationldese-rialization overheads for intra-node communication. Z-stack uses F-stack as the starting point which integrates the proven TCP/IP stack from FreeBSD, providing a versatile solution for a variety of cloud use cases and improving performance of data center networking. 

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