Peter M. Chen Recognized for Influential Work in Operating Systems with ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award

Prof. Peter M. Chen has been recognized with the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award for his paper entitled, “ReVirt: Enabling Intrusion Analysis through Virtual-Machine Logging and Replay,” which demonstrated that the execution of an arbitrary program inside a virtual machine can be replayed deterministically and efficiently. Prof. Chen authored the paper with his former CSE graduate students George Dunlap, Samuel King, Sukru Cinar, and Murtaza A. Basrai.

The SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award recognizes the most influential Operating Systems papers that were published at least ten years in the past.

The paper, which was published at the 2002 Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), describes their system called ReVirt. ReVirt removes the dependency on the target operating system by moving it into a virtual machine and logging below the virtual machine. This allows ReVirt to replay the system’s execution before, during, and after an intruder compromises the system, even if the intruder replaces the target operating system. It is also able to provide detailed observations about what occurred on the system. ReVirt was originally intended primarily for intrusion analysis, but record-and-replay has been used for debugging, fault-tolerance, to audit program executions, and other virtual machine services. The researchers’ work has influenced commercial products and inspired a research area that continues to this day.

Prof. Chen received his PhD in computer science from University of California, Berkeley, in 1992 and joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1993.  He received an NSF CAREER Award in 1996 and has been recognized for his contributions to operating systems research with the ACM-SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award. Prof. Chen is an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and has received numerous recognitions for his accomplishments as an educator. He is affiliated with the department’s Software Systems Lab and Computer Engineering Lab. He is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE.