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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 lizardloop on Tuesday July 07 2015, @01:06PM

    by lizardloop (4716) on Tuesday July 07 2015, @01:06PM (#206095) Journal

    This reminds of a module a university lecturer taught me. One of his pet concepts was "the librarian" that all software companies should have. It would be the librarians job to ensure good code was preserved in an archive somewhere and that any potential duplication of that code was avoided. I.e if you were working on a project the librarian should be constantly suggesting existing code in the archive that might be applicable to what you're doing so that you don't "reinvent" things accidentally. I've thought for a long time that this could be automated and I've made my own very meagre experiments in this regard. This seems like another step in that direction and I look forward to further developments on this.

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