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posted by n1 on Monday July 06 2015, @09:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the human-obsolescence dept.

MIT computer scientists have devised a new system that repairs dangerous software bugs by automatically importing functionality from other, more secure applications.

Remarkably, the system, dubbed CodePhage, doesn’t require access to the source code of the applications whose functionality it’s borrowing. Instead, it analyzes the applications’ execution and characterizes the types of security checks they perform. As a consequence, it can import checks from applications written in programming languages other than the one in which the program it’s repairing was written.

Once it’s imported code into a vulnerable application, CodePhage can provide a further layer of analysis that guarantees that the bug has been repaired.

[...] Sidiroglou-Douskos and his coauthors — MIT professor of computer science and engineering Martin Rinard, graduate student Fan Long, and Eric Lahtinen, a researcher in Rinard’s group — refer to the program CodePhage is repairing as the “recipient” and the program whose functionality it’s borrowing as the “donor.” To begin its analysis, CodePhage requires two sample inputs: one that causes the recipient to crash and one that doesn’t. A bug-locating program that the same group reported in March, dubbed DIODE, generates crash-inducing inputs automatically. But a user may simply have found that trying to open a particular file caused a crash.

[...] “The longer-term vision is that you never have to write a piece of code that somebody else has written before,” Rinard says. “The system finds that piece of code and automatically puts it together with whatever pieces of code you need to make your program work.”

“The technique of borrowing code from another program that has similar functionality, and being able to take a program that essentially is broken and fix it in that manner, is a pretty cool result,” says Emery Berger, a professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “To be honest, I was surprised that it worked at all.”


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  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday July 06 2015, @09:39PM

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 06 2015, @09:39PM (#205848) Homepage Journal

    Should I read this while believing the usual AI meaning of the words "efficient" and "effective"?

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2015, @01:49AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2015, @01:49AM (#205951)

    You should read this as copyright infringement, especially in the wake of Oracle v. Google.

    If you (or your code, AI, tamagotchi, whatever) copies compiled code from another executable that is not software you developed and own the rights to then you are illegally copying/stealing code from another software company.

    • (Score: 4, Touché) by penguinoid on Tuesday July 07 2015, @06:38AM

      by penguinoid (5331) on Tuesday July 07 2015, @06:38AM (#206005)

      My code is made of ones and zeros. If I see any ones or zeros in your code, expect to hear from my lawyer, you thief.

      --
      RIP Slashdot. Killed by greedy bastards.