2,779 research outputs found
Algorithm Diversity for Resilient Systems
Diversity can significantly increase the resilience of systems, by reducing
the prevalence of shared vulnerabilities and making vulnerabilities harder to
exploit. Work on software diversity for security typically creates variants of
a program using low-level code transformations. This paper is the first to
study algorithm diversity for resilience. We first describe how a method based
on high-level invariants and systematic incrementalization can be used to
create algorithm variants. Executing multiple variants in parallel and
comparing their outputs provides greater resilience than executing one variant.
To prevent different parallel schedules from causing variants' behaviors to
diverge, we present a synchronized execution algorithm for DistAlgo, an
extension of Python for high-level, precise, executable specifications of
distributed algorithms. We propose static and dynamic metrics for measuring
diversity. An experimental evaluation of algorithm diversity combined with
implementation-level diversity for several sequential algorithms and
distributed algorithms shows the benefits of algorithm diversity
A Survey of Symbolic Execution Techniques
Many security and software testing applications require checking whether
certain properties of a program hold for any possible usage scenario. For
instance, a tool for identifying software vulnerabilities may need to rule out
the existence of any backdoor to bypass a program's authentication. One
approach would be to test the program using different, possibly random inputs.
As the backdoor may only be hit for very specific program workloads, automated
exploration of the space of possible inputs is of the essence. Symbolic
execution provides an elegant solution to the problem, by systematically
exploring many possible execution paths at the same time without necessarily
requiring concrete inputs. Rather than taking on fully specified input values,
the technique abstractly represents them as symbols, resorting to constraint
solvers to construct actual instances that would cause property violations.
Symbolic execution has been incubated in dozens of tools developed over the
last four decades, leading to major practical breakthroughs in a number of
prominent software reliability applications. The goal of this survey is to
provide an overview of the main ideas, challenges, and solutions developed in
the area, distilling them for a broad audience.
The present survey has been accepted for publication at ACM Computing
Surveys. If you are considering citing this survey, we would appreciate if you
could use the following BibTeX entry: http://goo.gl/Hf5FvcComment: This is the authors pre-print copy. If you are considering citing
this survey, we would appreciate if you could use the following BibTeX entry:
http://goo.gl/Hf5Fv
Automatically Leveraging MapReduce Frameworks for Data-Intensive Applications
MapReduce is a popular programming paradigm for developing large-scale,
data-intensive computation. Many frameworks that implement this paradigm have
recently been developed. To leverage these frameworks, however, developers must
become familiar with their APIs and rewrite existing code. Casper is a new tool
that automatically translates sequential Java programs into the MapReduce
paradigm. Casper identifies potential code fragments to rewrite and translates
them in two steps: (1) Casper uses program synthesis to search for a program
summary (i.e., a functional specification) of each code fragment. The summary
is expressed using a high-level intermediate language resembling the MapReduce
paradigm and verified to be semantically equivalent to the original using a
theorem prover. (2) Casper generates executable code from the summary, using
either the Hadoop, Spark, or Flink API. We evaluated Casper by automatically
converting real-world, sequential Java benchmarks to MapReduce. The resulting
benchmarks perform up to 48.2x faster compared to the original.Comment: 12 pages, additional 4 pages of references and appendi
Incremental Dead State Detection in Logarithmic Time
Identifying live and dead states in an abstract transition system is a
recurring problem in formal verification; for example, it arises in our recent
work on efficiently deciding regex constraints in SMT. However,
state-of-the-art graph algorithms for maintaining reachability information
incrementally (that is, as states are visited and before the entire state space
is explored) assume that new edges can be added from any state at any time,
whereas in many applications, outgoing edges are added from each state as it is
explored. To formalize the latter situation, we propose guided incremental
digraphs (GIDs), incremental graphs which support labeling closed states
(states which will not receive further outgoing edges). Our main result is that
dead state detection in GIDs is solvable in amortized time per edge
for edges, improving upon per edge due to Bender, Fineman,
Gilbert, and Tarjan (BFGT) for general incremental directed graphs.
We introduce two algorithms for GIDs: one establishing the logarithmic time
bound, and a second algorithm to explore a lazy heuristics-based approach. To
enable an apples-to-apples experimental comparison, we implemented both
algorithms, two simpler baselines, and the state-of-the-art BFGT baseline using
a common directed graph interface in Rust. Our evaluation shows -x
speedups over BFGT for the largest input graphs over a range of graph classes,
random graphs, and graphs arising from regex benchmarks.Comment: 22 pages + reference
JWalk: a tool for lazy, systematic testing of java classes by design introspection and user interaction
Popular software testing tools, such as JUnit, allow frequent retesting of modified code; yet the manually created test scripts are often seriously incomplete. A unit-testing tool called JWalk has therefore been developed to address the need for systematic unit testing within the context of agile methods. The tool operates directly on the compiled code for Java classes and uses a new lazy method for inducing the changing design of a class on the fly. This is achieved partly through introspection, using Java’s reflection capability, and partly through interaction with the user, constructing and saving test oracles on the fly. Predictive rules reduce the number of oracle values that must be confirmed by the tester. Without human intervention, JWalk performs bounded exhaustive exploration of the class’s method protocols and may be directed to explore the space of algebraic constructions, or the intended design state-space of the tested class. With some human interaction, JWalk performs up to the equivalent of fully automated state-based testing, from a specification that was acquired incrementally
Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications
Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for
the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research
experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts
today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited
abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes,
thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led
to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at
formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism
are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of
clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN)
paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right
kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence
in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and
synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a
self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in
formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial
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