A new system developed at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) can repair bugs in software using smart processing that imports functionality from other programs, all without access to source code.
Like in all computer programming, removing software bugs that can cause system or application crashes has traditionally been a matter of finding the offending source code and rewriting it; every time you get updates to your operating system or applications, you’re actually downloading tools that rewrite source code on your system to patch vulnerabilities the developers have identified.
But the CSAIL system, called CodePhage, takes a very different approach. It borrows functionality from other applications to import into the offending process that causes a crash, assessing how certain tasks are executed and analysing how they do their own security checks to protect from vulnerabilities.
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