Performance comparison of path matching algorithms over compressed control flow traces

A control flow trace captures the complete sequence of dynamically executed basic blocks and function calls. It is usually stored in compressed form due to its large size. Matching an intraprocedural path in a control flow trace faces path interruption and path context problems and therefore requires the extension of traditional pattern matching algorithms. In this paper we evaluate different path matching schemes including those matching in the compressed data directly and those matching after the decompression. We design simple indices for the compressed data and show that they can greatly improve the performance. Our experimental results show that these schemes are useful and can be adapted to environments with different hardware settings and path matching requests.