External Exception Handlers

Erica Naone has put together an interesting entry on new software called ClearView. The software was created by Martin Richard's research group at MIT.

The goal behind this software is to key a watchful eye on running applications. Now, these application would have to be of some significance, otherwise, it probably would be worth babysitting them to this extent. But for applications containing sensitive data, something like ClearView can be very helpful.

The idea behind ClearView is to analyze the behavior of a given program while it is behaving as expected. This allows ClearView to determine what the rules of good behavior for a particular application are. Once these rules are broken, ClearView knows that the application is misbehaving and can address it. The real nice thing is, the fixes are applied to the running binary, not the source code.

The best way to picture ClearView from a high level perspective is to picture the running application as a piece of protected code running inside an exception handler. Obviously, this isn't in the code, and, isn't even real for that matter. But, it is similar to what happens. ClearView goes beyond what typical exception handlers do. It tries to fix the problem rather than point fingers. Maybe exception handlers inside code could learn from ClearView in the future, or maybe not.