February 24th, 2017 at 11 am in room 0.20 (INESC)

Cristian Cadar, Imperial College London
Symbolic Execution for Evolving Software

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.