Abstract:

This tutorial is aimed at the audience interested in knowing how software reliability and cybersecurity converge in terms of intrinsic hard problems, and how that knowledge can be useful for advancing the research and practice in both fields. This tutorial is based on our research in three Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) projects and our practical experience of applying the research. The tutorial will provide succinct understanding of the “hardness” through representative problems and by introducing a programming language agnostic notion of an intrinsic hardness spectrum derived from fundamental impediments to detecting vulnerabilities accurately. About 60% of the tutorial will be demonstrations to elaborate on the hardness spectrum and its practical applicability. The representative problems will pertain to reliability issues for operating system kernels and malware attacks on Android apps. We will introduce the use of a powerful program comprehension tool to derive the hardness spectrum by mapping the Java, C, and Java bytecode to high-level entities that reveal the inner workings of complex software.

Venue: 26th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2015), NIST, Gaithersburg, Maryland, November 2015.

Authors: Suresh Kothari, Benjamin Holland

Materials: https://goo.gl/eJ4f2B