Automatic bug finder

Tuesday, May 24, 2016 - 23:20 in Mathematics & Economics

Symbolic execution is a powerful software-analysis tool that can be used to automatically locate and even repair programming bugs. Essentially, it traces out every path that a program’s execution might take. But it tends not to work well with applications written using today’s programming frameworks. An application might consist of only 1,000 lines of new code, but it will generally import functions — such as those that handle virtual buttons — from a programming framework, which includes huge libraries of frequently reused code. The additional burden of evaluating the imported code makes symbolic execution prohibitively time consuming. Computer scientists address this problem by creating simple models of the imported libraries, which describe their interactions with new programs but don’t require line-by-line evaluation of their code. Building the models, however, is labor-intensive and error prone, and the models require regular updates, as programming frameworks are constantly evolving. Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial...

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