Publications related to Software bug

Silent Bugs Matter: A Study of Compiler-Introduced Security Bugs

Compilers assure that any produced optimized code is semantically equivalent to the original code. However, even "correct" compilers may introduce security bugs as security properties go beyond translation correctness. Security bugs introduced by such corr ...

Usenix Assoc2023

Arvin: Greybox Fuzzing Using Approximate Dynamic CFG Analysis

Mathias Josef Payer, Sirus Shahini

Fuzzing has emerged as the most broadly used testing technique to discover bugs. Effective fuzzers rely on coverage to prioritize inputs that exercise new program areas. Edge-based code coverage of the Program Under Test (PUT) is the most commonly used cov ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2023

Latency Interfaces for Systems Code

Rishabh Ramesh Iyer

This thesis demonstrates that it is feasible for systems code to expose a latency interface that describes its latency and related side effects for all inputs, just like the code's semantic interface describes its functionality and related side effects. S ...

EPFL2023

ACTOR: Action-Guided Kernel Fuzzing

Mathias Josef Payer

Fuzzing reliably and efficiently finds bugs in software, including operating system kernels. In general, higher code coverage leads to the discovery of more bugs. This is why most existing kernel fuzzers adopt strategies to generate a series of inputs that ...

Usenix Assoc2023

Robust Collaborative Learning with Linear Gradient Overhead

Rachid Guerraoui, John Stephan, Sadegh Farhadkhani, Le Nguyen Hoang, Nirupam Gupta, Rafaël Benjamin Pinot

Collaborative learning algorithms, such as distributed SGD (or D-SGD), are prone to faulty machines that may deviate from their prescribed algorithm because of software or hardware bugs, poisoned data or malicious behaviors. While many solutions have been ...

PLMR2023

Dynamic Linkers Are the Narrow Waist of Operating Systems

Adrien Ghosn, Charly Nicolas Lucien Castes

While software applications, programming languages, and hardware have changed, operating systems have not. Widely-used commodity operating systems are still modeled after the ones designed in the seventies. The accumulated burden of backward compatibility ...

Association for Computing Machinery2023

Performance Interfaces for Network Functions

George Candea, Rishabh Ramesh Iyer, Aikaterini Argyraki

Modern programmers routinely use third-party code, and infrastructure operators deploy software they did not write. This would not be possible without semantic interfaces---documentation, header files, specifications---that succinctly describe what that th ...

USENIX Association2022

One Fuzz Doesn’t Fit All: Optimizing Directed Fuzzing via Target-tailored Program State Restriction

Mathias Josef Payer

Fuzzing is the de-facto default technique to discover software flaws, randomly testing programs to discover crashing test cases. Yet, a particular scenario may only care about specific code regions (for, e.g., bug reproduction, patch or regression testing) ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2022

Towards reproducible software studies with MAO and Renku

Pamela Isabel Delgado Borda, Christine Choirat

In software engineering, the developers' joy of decomposing and recomposing microservice-based applications has led to an enormous wave of microservice artefact technologies. To understand them better, researchers perform hundreds of experiments and empiri ...

ELSEVIER2022

New Capabilities of the FLUKA Multi-Purpose Code

Nikolaos Charitonidis, André Donadon Servelle, Philippe Jean Schoofs, Francesco Cerutti

FLUKA is a general purpose Monte Carlo code able to describe the transport and interaction of any particle and nucleus type in complex geometries over an energy range extending from thermal neutrons to ultrarelativistic hadron collisions. It has many diffe ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2022

Seed Selection for Successful Fuzzing

Mathias Josef Payer

Mutation-based greybox fuzzing-unquestionably the most widely-used fuzzing technique-relies on a set of non-crashing seed inputs (a corpus) to bootstrap the bug-finding process. When evaluating a fuzzer, common approaches for constructing this corpus inclu ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2021

Preventing Use-After-Free Attacks with Fast Forward Allocation

Sanidhya Kashyap, Jungwon Lim

Memory-unsafe languages are widely used to implement critical systems like kernels and browsers, leading to thousands of memory safety issues every year. A use-after-free bug is a temporal memory error where the program accidentally visits a freed memory l ...

USENIX ASSOC2021

FuZZan: Efficient Sanitizer Metadata Design for Fuzzing

Mathias Josef Payer

Fuzzing is one of the most popular and effective techniques for finding software bugs. To detect triggered bugs, fuzzers leverage a variety of sanitizers in practice. Unfortunately, sanitizers target long running experiments-e.g., developer test suites-not ...

USENIX ASSOC2020

Verification of Software Network Functions with No Verification Expertise

Arseniy Zaostrovnykh

Software network functions (NFs), such as a network address translator, load balancer, or proxy, promise to bring flexibility and rapid innovation to computer networks and to reduce operational costs. However, continuous updates and flexibility typically c ...

EPFL2020

USBFuzz: A Framework for Fuzzing USB Drivers by Device Emulation

Mathias Josef Payer, Hui Peng

The Universal Serial Bus (USB) connects external devices to a host. This interface exposes the OS kernels and device drivers to attacks by malicious devices. Unfortunately, kernels and drivers were developed under a security model that implicitly trusts co ...

USENIX ASSOC2020

The NEBULA RPC-Optimized Architecture

Babak Falsafi, Alexandros Daglis, Siddharth Gupta, Mark Johnathon Sutherland, Dionysios Pnevmatikatos

Large-scale online services are commonly structured as a network of software tiers, which communicate over the datacenter network using RPCs. Ongoing trends towards software decomposition have led to the prevalence of tiers receiving and generating RPCs wi ...

2020

Scaling Functional Synthesis and Repair

Emmanouil Koukoutos

Program synthesis was first proposed a few decades ago, but in the last decade it has gained increased momentum in the research community. The increasing complexity of software has dictated the urgent need for improved supporting tools that verify the soft ...

EPFL2019

Verifying Software Network Functions with No Verification Expertise

George Candea, Solal Vincenzo Pirelli, Rishabh Ramesh Iyer, Aikaterini Argyraki, Luis David Figueiredo Mascarenhas Moreira Pedrosa, Matteo Rizzo

We present the design and implementation of Vigor, a software stack and toolchain for building and running software network middleboxes that are guaranteed to be correct, while preserving competitive performance and developer productivity. Developers write ...

ACM2019

Asynchronous Byzantine Machine Learning (the case of SGD)

Rachid Guerraoui, Mahsa Taziki, El Mahdi El Mhamdi, Rhicheek Patra, Georgios Damaskinos

Asynchronous distributed machine learning solutions have proven very effective so far, but always assuming perfectly functioning workers. In practice, some of the workers can however exhibit Byzantine behavior, caused by hardware failures, software bugs, c ...

2018

Elastic Program Transformations : Automatically Optimizing the Reliability/Performance Trade-off in Systems Software

Jonas Benedict Wagner

Performance and reliability are important yet conflicting properties of systems software. Software today often crashes, has security vulnerabilities and data loss, while many techniques that could address such issues remain unused due to performance concer ...

EPFL2017