Unraveling Time: A Deep Dive into TTD Instruction Emulation Bugs

Intro to TTD Time Travel Debugging (TTD) is a powerful usermode record-and-replay framework developed by Microsoft, originally introduced in a 2006 whitepaper under a different name. It is a staple for our workflows as it pertains to Windows environments. TTD allows a user to capture a comprehensive recording of a process (and potential child processes) during the lifetime of the process's execution. This is done by injecting a dynamic-link library (DLL) into the intended target process and capturing each state of the execution. This comprehensive historical view of the program's runtime behavior is stored in a database-like trace file ( .trace ), which, much like a database, can be further indexed to produce a corresponding .idx file for efficient querying and analysis. Once recorded, trace files can be consumed by a compatible client that supports replaying the entire execution history. In other words, TTD effectively functions as a record/replay debugger, enabling analysts to mov ... Read full article.