How to add a million bugs to a program (and why you might want to)
This is the first in a series of posts about evaluating and improving bug detection software by automatically injecting bugs into programs. You can find part two, with technical details of our bug injection technique, here . In this series of posts, I'm going to describe how to automatically put bugs in programs, a topic on which we just published a paper at Oakland, one of the top academic security conferences. The system we developed, LAVA , can put millions of bugs into real-world programs. Why would anyone want to do this? Are my coauthors and I sociopaths who just want to watch the world burn? No, but to see why we need such a system requires a little bit of background, which is what I hope to provide in this first post. I am sure this will come as a shock to most, but programs written by humans have bugs . Finding and fixing them is immensely time consuming; just how much of a developer's time is spent debugging is hard to pin down, but estimates range between 40% ...