Abhik Roychoudhury

"Automated Program Repair"

( MPI-SWS talk in Kooperation mit dem Fachbereich Informatik)

Automated program repair is an emerging and exciting field of research, which allows for automated rectification of errors and vulnerabilities. The use of automated program repair can be myriad, such as (a) improving programmer productivity (b) automated fixing of security vulnerabilities as they are detected, (c) self-healing software for autonomous devices such as drones, as well as (d) use of repair in introductory programming education by grading and providing hints for programming assignments. One of the key technical challenges in achieving automated program repair, is the lack of formal specifications of intended program behavior. In this talk, we will conceptualize the use of symbolic execution approaches and tools for extracting such specifications. This is done by analyzing a buggy program against selected tests, or against reference implementations. Such specification inference capability can be combined with program synthesis techniques to automatically repair programs. The capability of specification inference also serves a novel use of symbolic execution beyond verification and navigation of large search spaces. Automated program repair via symbolic execution goes beyond search-based approaches which attempt to lift patches from elsewhere in the program. Such an approach can construct “imaginative” patches, serves as a test-bed for the grand- challenge of automated programming, and contributes to the vision of trustworthy self-healing software. Towards the end of the talk, we can put the research on automated repair in light of the overall practice of software security, by sharing some experiences gained at the Singapore Cyber-security Consortium.

Bio: Abhik Roychoudhury is a Professor of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore. He is the Director of the National Satellite of Excellence in Trustworthy Software Systems at Singapore (2019-23). He helped establish and is leading the Singapore Cyber-security Consortium, which is a consortium of more than 40 companies engaging with academia for research, translation and collaboration in cyber-security. His research focuses on software testing and analysis, software security and trust-worthy software construction. He has advised on secure and smart cyber- space in different capacities, including being an industry advisory board member of the London Office for Rapid Cyber-security Advancement (LORCA) since 2018. He has been a keynote speaker at several conferences, and serves in the Steering Committee of ACM International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA). He is General Chair of the upcoming ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE) 2022. His former doctoral students have been placed at universities all over the world (including Peking University, Monash, and University College London) as academics and have received recognition for their doctoral research including an ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award. Abhik received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2000.