- author = "Eric Schulte and Jonathan DiLorenzo and Westley Weimer and Stephanie Forrest",
- title = "Automated Repair of Binary and Assembly Programs for Cooperating Embedded Devices",
- booktitle = "Proceedings of the eighteenth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems",
- year = "2013",
- series = "ASPLOS 2013",
- pages = "317--328",
- address = "Houston, Texas, USA",
- publisher_address = "New York, NY, USA",
- month = mar # " 16-20",
- publisher = "ACM",
- keywords = "genetic algorithms, genetic programming, genetic improvement, APR, assembly code, automated program repair, bytecode, evolutionary computation, fault localisation, legacy software, parallel distributed GP via SMS text",
- isbn13 = "978-1-4503-1870-9",
-
URL = "
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~weimer/p/schulte2013embedded.pdf",
-
DOI = "
doi:10.1145/2451116.2451151",
- acmid = "2451151",
- size = "11 pages",
-
abstract = "We present a method for automatically repairing
arbitrary software defects in embedded systems, which
have limited memory, disk and CPU capacities, but exist
in great numbers. We extend evolutionary computation
(EC) algorithms that search for valid repairs at the
source code level to assembly and ELF format binaries,
compensating for limited system resources with several
algorithmic innovations. Our method does not require
access to the source code or build toolchain of the
software under repair, does not require program
instrumentation, specialised execution environments, or
virtual machines, or prior knowledge of the bug
type.
We repair defects in ARM and x86 assembly as well as ELF binaries, observing decreases of 86percent in memory and 95percent in disk requirements, with 62percent decrease in repair time, compared to similar source-level techniques. These advances allow repairs previously possible only with C source code to be applied to any ARM or x86 assembly or ELF executable. Efficiency gains are achieved by introducing stochastic fault localization, with much lower overhead than comparable deterministic methods, and low-level program representations.
When distributed over multiple devices, our algorithm finds repairs faster than predicted by naive parallelism. Four devices using our approach are five times more efficient than a single device because of our collaboration model. The algorithm is implemented on Nokia N900 smartphones, with inter-phone communication fitting in 900 bytes sent in 7 SMS text messages per device per repair on average.",
-
notes = "gcc -S and objdump -d -j light weight sandboxing with
ulimit and chroot. OProfile
written in code AST == tree GP, ASM == assembler, ELF == machine code binary.
ptrace slowdown 2400 fold. p326 'no evidence of introduced bugs.'
p326 'distributed automated repair methods will be necessary' 'Sandboxing is crucial'.",
