Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Bae Systems Information and Electronic Systems Integration Inc.

Paolo Mario Piselli

Martin Conway Rinard

Stylianos Sidiroglou

Jeff Herbert Perkins

Timothy Alan Anderson

Basil C Krikeles

Eric Patrick Lahtinen

Greg Timothy Sullivan

An approach to detection and repair of application level semantic errors in deployed software includes inferring aspects of correct operation of a program. For instance, a suite of examples of operations that are known or assumed to be correct are used to infer correct operation. Further operation of the program can be compared to results found during correct operation and the logic of the program can be augmented to ensure that aspects of further examples of operation of the program are sufficiently similar to the examples in the correct suite. In some examples, the similarity is based on identifying invariants that are satisfied at certain points in the program execution, and augmenting (e.g., 'patching') the logic includes adding tests to confirm that the invariants are satisfied in the new examples. In some examples, the logic invokes an automatic or semi-automatic error handling procedure if the test is not satisfied. Augmenting the logic in this way may prevent malicious parties from exploiting the semantic errors, and may prevent failures in execution of the programs that may have been avoided.

Automatic correction of program logic

Growing community of inventors

Arlington, MA, United States of America

Paolo Mario Piselli