Hardware Tracing

Module	rvzr/executor.py, rvzr/executor_km/
Public interface	Executor
Inputs	TestCaseProgram, InputData
Outputs	HTrace

Executor

The Executor runs test cases on real hardware and collects hardware traces (HTraces) using side-channel measurements. It uses a two-layer architecture: Python code communicates with a kernel module that performs measurements in kernel space.

Python (executor.py)
  ├─ X86IntelExecutor
  ├─ X86AMDExecutor
  └─ ARM64Executor
       │
       │ /sys/rvzr_executor/ interface
       ▼
Kernel Module (executor_km/)

HTrace representation

The HTrace class (rvzr/traces.py) represents hardware traces collected during execution. The executor produces one HTrace object per program-input pair, meaning that for each TestCaseProgram execution with each InputData input, one HTrace is generated.

Each HTrace encapsulates multiple measurements results (samples): This is because the executor typically repeats the execution several times and each execution produces one measurement sample. Such repeated measurements allow us to apply statistical methods when comparing noisy hardware traces (see Trace Analysis below).

The structure of an HTrace is as follows:

HTrace
  └─ Array[RawHTraceSample]
       ├─ trace       Main measurement (cache bitmap, timestamp, or registers)
       └─ pfc0-pfc4   Performance counter values