Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

ing WS1S Systems to Verify Parameterized Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . 188 Kai Baukus, Saddek Bensalem, Yassine Lakhnech and Karsten Stahl FMona: A Tool for Expressing Validation Techniques over Infinite State Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204 J.-P. Bodeveix and M. Filali Transitive Closures of Regular Relations for Verifying Infinite-State Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220 Bengt Jonsson and Marcus Nilsson Diagnostic and Test Generation Using Static Analysis to Improve Automatic Test Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 Marius Bozga, Jean-Claude Fernandez and Lucian Ghirvu Efficient Diagnostic Generation for Boolean Equation Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . 251 Radu Mateescu Efficient Model-Checking Compositional State Space Generation with Partial Order Reductions for Asynchronous Communicating Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266 Jean-Pierre Krimm and Laurent Mounier Checking for CFFD-Preorder with Tester Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283 Juhana Helovuo and Antti Valmari Fair Bisimulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299 Thomas A. Henzinger and Sriram K. Rajamani Integrating Low Level Symmetries into Reachability Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315 Karsten Schmidt Model-Checking Tools Model Checking Support for the ASM High-Level Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331 Giuseppe Del Castillo and Kirsten Winter Table of

Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems. Proc. TACAS 2009

Research at the intersection of machine learning, programming languages, and software engineering has recently taken important steps in proposing learnable probabilistic models of source code that exploit code's abundance of patterns. In this article, we survey this work. We contrast programming languages against natural languages and discuss how these similarities and differences drive the design of probabilistic models. We present a taxonomy based on the underlying design principles of each model and use it to navigate the literature. Then, we review how researchers have adapted these models to application areas and discuss cross-cutting and application-specific challenges and opportunities.

A Survey of Machine Learning for Big Code and Naturalness

Research at the intersection of machine learning, programming languages, and software engineering has recently taken important steps in proposing learnable probabilistic models of source code that exploit the abundance of patterns of code. In this article, we survey this work. We contrast programming languages against natural languages and discuss how these similarities and differences drive the design of probabilistic models. We present a taxonomy based on the underlying design principles of each model and use it to navigate the literature. Then, we review how researchers have adapted these models to application areas and discuss cross-cutting and application-specific challenges and opportunities.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3212695

The automatic detection of software vulnerabilities is an important research problem. However, existing solutions to this problem rely on human experts to define features and often miss many vulnerabilities (i.e., incurring high false negative rate). In this paper, we initiate the study of using deep learning-based vulnerability detection to relieve human experts from the tedious and subjective task of manually defining features. Since deep learning is motivated to deal with problems that are very different from the problem of vulnerability detection, we need some guiding principles for applying deep learning to vulnerability detection. In particular, we need to find representations of software programs that are suitable for deep learning. For this purpose, we propose using code gadgets to represent programs and then transform them into vectors, where a code gadget is a number of (not necessarily consecutive) lines of code that are semantically related to each other. This leads to the design and implementation of a deep learning-based vulnerability detection system, called Vulnerability Deep Pecker (VulDeePecker). In order to evaluate VulDeePecker, we present the first vulnerability dataset for deep learning approaches. Experimental results show that VulDeePecker can achieve much fewer false negatives (with reasonable false positives) than other approaches. We further apply VulDeePecker to 3 software products (namely Xen, Seamonkey, and Libav) and detect 4 vulnerabilities, which are not reported in the National Vulnerability Database but were "silently" patched by the vendors when releasing later versions of these products; in contrast, these vulnerabilities are almost entirely missed by the other vulnerability detection systems we experimented with.

/pdf/vuldeepecker-a-deep-learning-based-system-for-vulnerability-3b0bpu5rbk.pdf

VulDeePecker: A Deep Learning-Based System for Vulnerability Detection

The ecosystem of open source software (OSS) has been growing considerably in size. In addition, code clones - code fragments that are copied and pasted within or between software systems - are also proliferating. Although code cloning may expedite the process of software development, it often critically affects the security of software because vulnerabilities and bugs can easily be propagated through code clones. These vulnerable code clones are increasing in conjunction with the growth of OSS, potentially contaminating many systems. Although researchers have attempted to detect code clones for decades, most of these attempts fail to scale to the size of the ever-growing OSS code base. The lack of scalability prevents software developers from readily managing code clones and associated vulnerabilities. Moreover, most existing clone detection techniques focus overly on merely detecting clones and this impairs their ability to accurately find "vulnerable" clones. In this paper, we propose VUDDY, an approach for the scalable detection of vulnerable code clones, which is capable of detecting security vulnerabilities in large software programs efficiently and accurately. Its extreme scalability is achieved by leveraging function-level granularity and a length-filtering technique that reduces the number of signature comparisons. This efficient design enables VUDDY to preprocess a billion lines of code in 14 hour and 17 minutes, after which it requires a few seconds to identify code clones. In addition, we designed a security-aware abstraction technique that renders VUDDY resilient to common modifications in cloned code, while preserving the vulnerable conditions even after the abstraction is applied. This extends the scope of VUDDY to identifying variants of known vulnerabilities, with high accuracy. In this study, we describe its principles and evaluate its efficacy and effectiveness by comparing it with existing mechanisms and presenting the vulnerabilities it detected. VUDDY outperformed four state-of-the-art code clone detection techniques in terms of both scalability and accuracy, and proved its effectiveness by detecting zero-day vulnerabilities in widely used software systems, such as Apache HTTPD and Ubuntu OS Distribution.

/pdf/vuddy-a-scalable-approach-for-vulnerable-code-clone-2hy2jp586t.pdf

VUDDY: A Scalable Approach for Vulnerable Code Clone Discovery

In this article we present a general method for achieving global static analyzers that are precise, sound, yet also scalable. Our method generalizes the sparse analysis techniques on top of the abstract interpretation framework to support relational as well as non-relational semantics properties for C-like languages. We first use the abstract interpretation framework to have a global static analyzer whose scalability is unattended. Upon this underlying sound static analyzer, we add our generalized sparse analysis techniques to improve its scalability while preserving the precision of the underlying analysis. Our framework determines what to prove to guarantee that the resulting sparse version should preserve the precision of the underlying analyzer.We formally present our framework; we present that existing sparse analyses are all restricted instances of our framework; we show more semantically elaborate design examples of sparse non-relational and relational static analyses; we present their implemen- tation results that scale to analyze up to one million lines of C programs. We also show a set of implementation techniques that turn out to be critical to economically support the sparse analysis process.

/pdf/design-and-implementation-of-sparse-global-analyses-for-c-3hkyhz8nvu.pdf

Design and implementation of sparse global analyses for C-like languages

We present a method for selectively applying context-sensitivity during interprocedural program analysis. Our method applies context-sensitivity only when and where doing so is likely to improve the precision that matters for resolving given queries. The idea is to use a pre-analysis to estimate the impact of context-sensitivity on the main analysis's precision, and to use this information to find out when and where the main analysis should turn on or off its context-sensitivity. We formalize this approach and prove that the analysis always benefits from the pre-analysis-guided context-sensitivity. We implemented this selective method for an existing industrial-strength interval analyzer for full C. The method reduced the number of (false) alarms by 24.4%, while increasing the analysis cost by 27.8% on average. The use of the selective method is not limited to context-sensitivity. We demonstrate this generality by following the same principle and developing a selective relational analysis.

/pdf/selective-context-sensitivity-guided-by-impact-pre-analysis-3qx0gxy331.pdf

Selective context-sensitivity guided by impact pre-analysis

We present VERISMART, a highly precise verifier for ensuring arithmetic safety of Ethereum smart contracts. Writing safe smart contracts without unintended behavior is critically important because smart contracts are immutable and even a single flaw can cause huge financial damage. In particular, ensuring that arithmetic operations are safe is one of the most important and common security concerns of Ethereum smart contracts nowadays. In response, several safety analyzers have been proposed over the past few years, but state-of-the-art is still unsatisfactory; no existing tools achieve high precision and recall at the same time, inherently limited to producing annoying false alarms or missing critical bugs. By contrast, VERISMART aims for an uncompromising analyzer that performs exhaustive verification without compromising precision or scalability, thereby greatly reducing the burden of manually checking undiscovered or incorrectly-reported issues. To achieve this goal, we present a new domain-specific algorithm for verifying smart contracts, which is able to automatically discover and leverage transaction invariants that are essential for precisely analyzing smart contracts. Evaluation with real-world smart contracts shows that VERISMART can detect all arithmetic bugs with a negligible number of false alarms, far outperforming existing analyzers.

/pdf/verismart-a-highly-precise-safety-verifier-for-ethereum-4trqg73kaa.pdf

VERISMART: A Highly Precise Safety Verifier for Ethereum Smart Contracts

Building a cost-effective static analyser for real-world programs is still regarded an art. One key contributor to this grim reputation is the difficulty in balancing the cost and the precision of an analyser. An ideal analyser should be adaptive to a given analysis task, and avoid using techniques that unnecessarily improve precision and increase analysis cost. However, achieving this ideal is highly nontrivial, and it requires a large amount of engineering efforts. In this paper we present a new approach for building an adaptive static analyser. In our approach, the analyser includes a sophisticated parameterised strategy that decides, for each part of a given program, whether to apply a precision-improving technique to that part or not. We present a method for learning a good parameter for such a strategy from an existing codebase via Bayesian optimisation. The learnt strategy is then used for new, unseen programs. Using our approach, we developed partially flow- and context-sensitive variants of a realistic C static analyser. The experimental results demonstrate that using Bayesian optimisation is crucial for learning from an existing codebase. Also, they show that among all program queries that require flow- or context-sensitivity, our partially flow- and context-sensitive analysis answers the 75% of them, while increasing the analysis cost only by 3.3x of the baseline flow- and context-insensitive analysis, rather than 40x or more of the fully sensitive version.

/pdf/learning-a-strategy-for-adapting-a-program-analysis-via-2mns4qd05v.pdf

Hakjoo Oh

Papers

VUDDY: A Scalable Approach for Vulnerable Code Clone Discovery

Design and implementation of sparse global analyses for C-like languages

Selective context-sensitivity guided by impact pre-analysis

VERISMART: A Highly Precise Safety Verifier for Ethereum Smart Contracts

Learning a strategy for adapting a program analysis via bayesian optimisation