Symbolic Execution for Evolving Software
Abstract
One of the distinguishing characteristics of software systems is that they evolve: new patches are committed to software repositories and new versions are released to users on a continuous basis. Unfortunately, many of these changes bring unexpected bugs that break the stability of the system or affect its security. In this talk, I describe our work on devising novel symbolic execution techniques for increasing the confidence in evolving software: a technique for reasoning about the correctness of optimisations, in particular those that take advantage of SIMD and GPGPU capabilities; a technique for high-coverage patch testing, and a technique for revealing regression bugs and behavioural divergences across versions.
Bio
Cristian Cadar is a Reader (Associate Professor) in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, where he leads the Software Reliability Group. His research interests span the areas of software engineering, computer systems and security, with an emphasis on building practical techniques and tools for improving the reliability and security of software systems. He was elected as a Fellow of the British Computer Society in 2016, awarded the ACM Computer and Communications Security (CCS) Test of Time Award in 2016, the EuroSys Jochen Liedtke Young Researcher Award in 2015, an EPSRC Early-Career Fellowship in 2013, and artifact or paper awards at ICST 2016, ISSTA 2014, ESEC/FSE 2013 and OSDI 2008. Cristian received a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University, and undergraduate and Master’s degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Date: 2017-Feb-24 Time: 11:00:00 Room: 020
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