The EBT language was initially developed by Serhei Makarov over the summer of 2014 as part of a USRA internship with the Granary project in UofT's computer systems group. The project is currently in the process of being rewritten; stay tuned for more information.
The eventual aim is to build a high-level event-based language that generates client modules for a Dynamic Binary Translation framework with a minimal amount of hassle, both for passively observing a target program and for altering its execution with additional safety checks (as done, e.g. by Valgrind's memcheck
utility). A high-level language for this purpose has a lot of potential, as writing a DBT client manually requires handling the target program code at a very low level, whereas using a pre-existing DBT client or Valgrind utilities often involves giving up customizability.
The overall design mimics languages such as SystemTap or DTrace, but with additional features taking advantage of the capabilities of a DBT system such as Granary or DynamoRIO.
You may also be interested in the references for my poster at PACT 2014.
The current version of ebt
requires a working DynamoRIO installation, as well as openssl-devel
(on Fedora, or equivalent library on other systems) for generating directory name hashes. Once the testcases in dr-demo/
are all working, I plan to update this README
with detailed instructions for setting up ebt
and developing and running script programs.