Program Statements Research Articles

Combining BMC and Fuzzing Techniques for Finding Software Vulnerabilities in Concurrent Programs

Finding software vulnerabilities in concurrent programs is a challenging task due to the size of the state-space exploration, as the number of interleavings grows exponentially with the number of program threads and statements. We propose and evaluate EBF (Ensembles of Bounded Model Checking with Fuzzing) – a technique that combines Bounded Model Checking (BMC) and Gray-Box Fuzzing (GBF) to find software vulnerabilities in concurrent programs. Since there are no publicly-available GBF tools for concurrent code, we first propose <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">OpenGBF</i> – a new open-source concurrency-aware gray-box fuzzer that explores different thread schedules by instrumenting the code under test with random delays. Then, we build an ensemble of a BMC tool and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">OpenGBF</i> in the following way. On the one hand, when the BMC tool in the ensemble returns a counterexample, we use it as a seed for <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">OpenGBF</i> , thus increasing the likelihood of executing paths guarded by complex mathematical expressions. On the other hand, we aggregate the outcomes of the BMC and GBF tools in the ensemble using a decision matrix, thus improving the accuracy of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">EBF</i> . We evaluate <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">EBF</i> against state-of-the-art pure BMC tools and show that it can generate up to 14.9% more correct verification witnesses than the corresponding BMC tools alone. Furthermore, we demonstrate the efficacy of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">OpenGBF</i> , by showing that it can find 24.2% of the vulnerabilities in our evaluation suite, while non-concurrency-aware GBF tools can only find 0.55%. Finally, thanks to our concurrency-aware <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">OpenGBF</i> , <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">EBF</i> detects a data race in the open-source <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">wolfMqtt</i> library and reproduces known bugs in several other real-world programs, which demonstrates its effectiveness in finding vulnerabilities in real-world software.

Explainable Software Fault Localization Model: From Blackbox to Whitebox

The most resource-intensive and laborious part of debugging is finding the exact location of the fault from the more significant number of code snippets. Plenty of machine intelligence models has offered the effective localization of defects. Some models can precisely locate the faulty with more than 95% accuracy, resulting in demand for trustworthy models in fault localization. Confidence and trustworthiness within machine intelligence-based software models can only be achieved via explainable artificial intelligence in Fault Localization (XFL). The current study presents a model for generating counterfactual interpretations for the fault localization model's decisions. Neural system approximations and disseminated presentation of input information may be achieved by building a nonlinear neural network model. That demonstrates a high level of proficiency in transfer learning, even with minimal training data. The proposed XFL would make the decision-making transparent simultaneously without impacting the model's performance. The proposed XFL ranks the software program statements based on the possible vulnerability score approximated from the training data. The model's performance is further evaluated using various metrics like the number of assessed statements, confidence level of fault localization, and Top-N evaluation strategies.

Applicant Ranking Criteria in Adult Reconstruction Fellowship: Your Interview Counts When Applying for Fellowship.

BackgroundThe criteria for successful ranking in the fellowship match remains unclear. Although some data are available regarding the qualities sought after in medical students for the residency match, little information is available regarding the fellowship match. In this study, for arthroplasty applications to our institution, the interview was hypothesized to be the most important factor for ranking, with little impact from other commonly assessed variables.MethodologyAll 40 applicants who applied for fellowship were selected to interview for the 2017 Brown University Comprehensive Adult Reconstruction Fellowship and were evaluated on the interview, United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) scores, letters of recommendation, personal statement, extracurricular activities, research, and caliber of undergraduate institution, medical school, and residency program. The interview score was based on a combined score of individual components of personality, program fit, and research.ResultsOf the 40 applicants who were interviewed, eight did not match. The interview score was the only statistically significant variable and had the highest correlation with ranking (r = 0.92). Moreover, extracurricular activities correlated with a higher ranking whereas USMLE Step 1/Step 2 scores had a relatively low correlation (r = 0.32 and 0.29, respectively). Recommendation letters and caliber of medical school, undergraduate education, and residency demonstrated low correlations. The personal statement and research components had the lowest correlations.ConclusionsThe combined interview score, in particular the personality and program fit components, was the most important determinant of successful ranking at our institution. Because all 40 applicants who applied for an arthroplasty fellowship at our institution were selected for an interview, there was no pre-interview selection bias that would confound these results. However, the ranking does not correlate with an applicant’s success in fellowship, and further research is required to determine the qualifications of a successful surgeon.

Linguocultural Organization of the International Broadcasting in Russia Today

In modern political and socio-cultural realities, a special role and importance are assigned to international broadcasting as a technology for positioning a content-producing country in the external environment, i. e. the global media space. The subject of this study is the explication of the specifics of the linguocultural organization of international broadcasting. The experience of Russia Today was taken as the flagship of international broadcasting in the Russian segment of the media space, through its activities influencing the formation of the geopolitical situation in the modern globalizing world. A complex of methods was used: historical and political analysis, structural analysis, contextual analysis, secondary analysis of sociological and statistical data. The empirical base was made up of four editions of the Sputnik Agency (Sputnik International, Sputnik Polska, Sputnik Trkiye, and Sputnik Belarus), representing various linguocultures - with differentiated ethnic and religious characteristics that have not only linguistic but also cultural manifestations in general. Based on the results of the study, it is concluded that the linguocultural organization of international broadcasting is considered as a means of implementing the diplomatic mission of the state-broadcaster with soft power tools in the globalizing world. It is based on the representation of positioning content, taking into account ethnicity, religion together with the linguistic and cultural characteristics of the audience. Both the effectiveness of promoting program statements and ideas and strengthening the countrys geopolitics depend on the degree of linguocultural orientation of international broadcasting activities.

Circulatory Management of Polymer Waste: Recycling into Fine Fibers and Their Applications.

In modern society, it is impossible to imagine life without polymeric materials. However, managing the waste composed of these materials is one of the most significant environmental issues confronting us in the present day. Recycling polymeric waste is the most important action currently available to reduce environmental impacts worldwide and is one of the most dynamic areas in industry today. Utilizing this waste could not only benefit the environment but also promote sustainable development and circular economy management. In its program statement, the European Union has committed to support the use of sorted polymeric waste. This study reviews recent attempts to recycle this waste and convert it by alternative technologies into fine, nano-, and microscale fibers using electrospinning, blowing, melt, or centrifugal spinning. This review provides information regarding applying reprocessed fine fibers in various areas and a concrete approach to mitigate the threat of pollution caused by polymeric materials.

Exploring Non-Expert Robot Programming Through Crowdsourcing.

A longstanding barrier to deploying robots in the real world is the ongoing need to author robot behavior. Remote data collection–particularly crowdsourcing—is increasingly receiving interest. In this paper, we make the argument to scale robot programming to the crowd and present an initial investigation of the feasibility of this proposed method. Using an off-the-shelf visual programming interface, non-experts created simple robot programs for two typical robot tasks (navigation and pick-and-place). Each needed four subtasks with an increasing number of programming statements (if statement, while loop, variables) for successful completion of the programs. Initial findings of an online study (N = 279) indicate that non-experts, after minimal instruction, were able to create simple programs using an off-the-shelf visual programming interface. We discuss our findings and identify future avenues for this line of research.

Early Dropout of Children and Youth from Sports – International Perspective and Societal Backgrounds

Sport and physical activities of children are essential in forming their health, personality, society and other factors which affect their future life either directly or indirectly. Their life attitudes are shaped by experience, and one of domains that can be affected in them for ever based on positive or negative experience is physical activity and relation thereto. Significance and awareness of this societal problem currently lead to activities which are to support sports and physical movement of children and youth. Efforts focused on the prevention of early dropout of children from sports are in the interest of kinanthropological research studies, national children’s sports support programmes where the issue often becomes part of political and programme statements of governments, civic and non-profit organizations and sports associations. In spite of all these efforts, however, we still face a massive dropout of children from sports, which is not replaced with an adequate alternative physical activity. Consequences of the negative, and sometimes even toxic experience with physical activity at early age lasts until adulthood, which brings a range of personal, health and social problems. Possibilities for reducing the phenomenon consist in systematic work dealing with the support and improvement of coaching procedures which will be focused more on the needs of children and diverted from the traditional perception of coaching education focused primarily on the needs of coaches, on the building of positive relationship with parents as partners in the process of physical education of children, and on extending the range of physical activities for children also in the environment of non-competitive sports.

Program Documents as a Source on the History of the Anarchist Movement in Ukraine in the Early 20th Century

The article considers programs and program documents as a historical source on the history of the anarchist movement in Ukraine in the early 20th century. Without a doubt, the historical conditions prevailing in Ukraine and Russia in 1903–1914 influenced the formation and nature of sources. In particular, the absence of a central body and the denial of the movement as a whole affected the core of the source base, marked by a relatively small number of party-organizational documents with particular characteristics. The all-Russian character of anarchist activity also had an impact on the nature of sources. They were distributed in Ukraine, but their contents did not contain any references to specific activities in its territory.The article provides a classification of sources, which are divided into such groups: programs and statutes, congress resolutions, party press, activists’ memoirs and observations, private correspondence. The article describes the programs and program statements of anarchists. The specifics of the program-organizational sources of anarchists are also determined. They are characterized according to the views of anarchists on the organization itself and the party leadership. Not recognizing any organization, considering any leadership a sort of violence against an individual, anarchists advocated full autonomy and independence of groups, interaction on a federal basis.The article characterizes the programs and program statements of anarchists as a historical source. The historical value of documents is determined; their specificity is defined. The research of documents establishes ideological principles, tactics of struggle, ideas about the role of some social groups in the revolution. The studied documents allow establishing the territory of anarchist activity in Ukraine at the beginning of the 20th century.

Structural synthesis considering mixed discrete–continuous design variables: A Bayesian framework

In this work attention is directed to general structural optimization problems considering discrete–continuous design variables. The optimization problem is formulated as the minimization of an objective function subject to multiple design requirements. The mathematical programming statement is set into the framework of a Bayesian model updating problem. Constraints are handled directly within the proposed scheme, generating designs distributed over the feasible design space. Based on these samples, a set of designs lying in the vicinity of the optimal solution set is obtained. The Bayesian model updating problem is solved by an effective Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation scheme, where appropriate proposal distributions are introduced for the continuous and discrete design variables. The approach can efficiently estimate the sensitivity of the final design and constraints with respect to the design variables. In addition, the numerical implementation of the optimization algorithm depends on few control parameters. For illustration purposes, the general formulation is applied to an important class of problems, specifically, reliability-based design optimization of structural systems under stochastic excitation. Three numerical examples showing the effectiveness and potentiality of the approach reported herein are presented.

CRaDLe: Deep code retrieval based on semantic Dependency Learning

Code retrieval is a common practice for programmers to reuse existing code snippets in the open-source repositories. Given a user query (i.e., a natural language description), code retrieval aims at searching the most relevant ones from a set of code snippets. The main challenge of effective code retrieval lies in mitigating the semantic gap between natural language descriptions and code snippets. With the ever-increasing amount of available open-source code, recent studies resort to neural networks to learn the semantic matching relationships between the two sources. The statement-level dependency information, which highlights the dependency relations among the program statements during the execution, reflects the structural importance of one statement in the code, which is favorable for accurately capturing the code semantics but has never been explored for the code retrieval task. In this paper, we propose CRaDLe, a novel approach for Code Retrieval based on statement-level semantic Dependency Learning. Specifically, CRaDLe distills code representations through fusing both the dependency and semantic information at the statement level, and then learns a unified vector representation for each code and description pair for modeling the matching relationship. Comprehensive experiments and analysis on real-world datasets show that the proposed approach can accurately retrieve code snippets for a given query and significantly outperform the state-of-the-art approaches on the task.

K-Step Crossover Method based on Genetic Algorithm for Test Suite Prioritization in Regression Testing

Software is an integration of numerous programming modules&amp;nbsp; (e.g., functions, procedures, legacy system, reusable components, etc.) tested and combined to build the entire module. However, some undesired faults may occur due to a change in modules while performing validation and verification. Retesting of entire software is a costly affair in terms of money and time. Therefore, to avoid retesting&amp;nbsp;of entire&amp;nbsp;software, regression testing is performed. In regression testing, an earlier created test suite is used to retest the software system&amp;#39;s modified module. Regression Testing works in three manners; minimizing test cases, selecting test cases, and prioritizing test cases. In this paper, a two-phase algorithm has been proposed that considers test case selection and test case prioritization technique for performing regression testing on several modules ranging from a smaller line of codes to huge line codes of procedural language. A textual based differencing algorithm has been implemented for test case selection. Program statements modified between two modules are used for textual differencing and utilized to identify test cases that affect modified program statements. In the next step, test case prioritization is implemented by applying the Genetic Algorithm for code/condition coverage. Genetic operators: Crossover and Mutation have been applied over the initial population (i.e. test cases), taking code/condition coverage as fitness criterion to provide a prioritized test suite. Prioritization algorithm can be applied over both original and reduced test suite depending upon the test suite&amp;#39;s size or the need for accuracy. In the obtained results, the efficiency of the prioritization algorithms has been analyzed by the Average Percentage of Code Coverage (APCC) and Average Percentage of Code Coverage with cost (APCCc). A comparison of the proposed approach is also done with the previously proposed methods and it is observed that APCC &amp;amp; APCCc values achieve higher percentage values faster in the case of the prioritized test suite in contrast to the non-prioritized test suite.

Analyzing Dynamic Code

Dynamic languages, such as JavaScript, employ string-to-code primitives to turn dynamically generated text into executable code at run-time. These features make standard static analysis extremely hard if not impossible, because its essential data structures, i.e., the control-flow graph and the system of recursive equations associated with the program to analyze, are themselves dynamically mutating objects. Nevertheless, assembling code at run-time by manipulating strings, such as by eval in JavaScript, has been always strongly discouraged, since it is often recognized that “ eval is evil ,” leading static analyzers to not consider such statements or ignoring their effects. Unfortunately, the lack of formal approaches to analyze string-to-code statements pose a perfect habitat for malicious code, that is surely evil and do not respect good practice rules, allowing them to hide malicious intents as strings to be converted to code and making static analyses blind to the real malicious aim of the code. Hence, the need to handle string-to-code statements approximating what they can execute, and therefore allowing the analysis to continue (even in the presence of dynamically generated program statements) with an acceptable degree of precision, should be clear. To reach this goal, we propose a static analysis allowing us to collect string values and to soundly over-approximate and analyze the code potentially executed by a string-to-code statement.

Spectrum-based multi-fault localization using Chaotic Genetic Algorithm

Abstract Context: In the field of software engineering, the most complex and time consuming activity is fault-finding. Due to increasing size and complexity of software, there is a necessity of automated fault detection tool which can detect fault with minimal human intervention. A programmer spends a lot of time and effort on software fault localization. Various Spectrum Based Fault Localization (SBFL) techniques have already been developed to automate the fault localization in single-fault software. But, there is a scarcity of fault localization technique for multi-fault software. In our study, we have found that pure SBFL is not always sufficient for effective fault localization in multi-fault programs. Objective: To address the above challenge, we propose an automated framework using Chaos-based Genetic Algorithm for Multi-fault Localization (CGAML) based on SBFL technique. Methods: Traditional Genetic Algorithm (GA) sometimes stuck in local optima, and it takes more time to converge. Different chaos mapping functions have been applied to GA for better performance. We have used logistic mapping function to achieve chaotic sequence. The proposed technique CGAML first calculates the suspiciousness score for each program statement and then assigns ranks according to that score. The statements having smaller rank means there is a high probability of the statements to be faulty. Results: Five open-source benchmark programs are tested to evaluate the efficiency of CGAML technique. The experimental results show CGAML gives better results for both single-fault and multi-fault programs in comparison with existing spectrum-based fault localization techniques. Conclusion: E X A M metric is used to compare the performance of our proposed technique with other existing techniques. Smaller E X A M score denotes the higher accuracy of the technique. The proposed framework generates smaller E X A M score in comparison with other existing techniques. We found that, overall CGAML works on an average 8.5% better than GA for both single-fault and multi-fault software.

A dynamic slicing-based approach for effective SBFL technique

Fault finding is an activity to locate the fault or bug present in a software. It is a very time taking job and needs much more effort if done manually. Hence, automated fault localisation is always in high demand which reduces the human effort and also makes the task more accurate. Among different existing debugging techniques, spectrum-based debugging is the most efficient for automated fault localisation. Dynamic program slicing is another technique which can reduce the debugging time by reducing the unaffected source codes depending on slicing criteria. In this paper, we present a spectrum-based fault localisation technique by using dynamic slicing. Context-sensitive slicing is used to diminish fault localisation time and makes the process more effective. SBFL metrics are used in the sliced program to find the suspiciousness score of individual program statements. The efficiency of the proposed approach is evaluated on three open-source programs. From results, we notice that due to dynamic slicing the technique takes less time to find the suspiciousness score of individual statements in the sliced program compared to original program. We have also observed that the programmer needs to inspect less source code to detect the buggy statement. The result says that the proposed approach outperforms the pure spectrum-based fault localisation techniques.

Incremental Formula-Based Fix Localization

Automatically fixing bugs in software programs can significantly reduce the cost and improve the productivity of the software. Toward this goal, a critical and challenging problem is automatic fix localization, which identifies program locations where a bug fix can be synthesized. In this paper, we present AgxFaults, a technique that automatically identifies minimal subsets of program statements at which a suitable modification can remove the error. AgxFaults works based on dynamically encoding semantic of program parts that are relevant to an observed error into an unsatisfiable logical formula and then manipulating this formula in an increasingly on-demand manner. We perform various experiments on faulty versions of the traffic collision avoidance system (TCAS) program in the Siemens Suite, programs in Bekkouche’s benchmark, and server real bugs in the Defects4J benchmark. The experimental results show that AgxFaults outperforms single-path-formula approaches in terms of effectiveness in finding fix localization and fault localization. AgxFaults is better than program-formula-based approaches in terms of efficiency and scalability, while providing similar effectiveness. Specifically, the solving time of AgxFaults is 28% faster, and the running time is 45% faster, than the program-formula-based approach, while providing similar fault localization results.

„To był mastodont” – Mieczysław Szczuka w poszukiwaniu piękna utylitarnego

&lt;p&gt;Artykuł jest próbą biografii Mieczysława Szczuki – polskiego artysty-grafika międzywojnia. Jego krótka działalność jest istotna z uwagi na fascynację radzieckim konstruktywizmem, pionierstwo w zakresie polskiego fotomontażu, działalność teoretyczną oraz zespolenie idei artystycznych&lt;br /&gt;z komunistycznym dążeniem do przeprowadzenia rewolucji społeczno-politycznej. Szczuka współtworzył czasopisma artystyczno-literackie (Blok, Dźwignia) oraz angażował się w wydawniczą działalność awangardową. Przywoływane wypowiedzi programowe wpisywały się w artystyczne&lt;br /&gt;i literackie dyskusje międzywojenne.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt; &lt;/p&gt;

On Blast: A Framework for Monitoring and Responding to Online Comments About Your Graduate Medical Education Program.

On Blast: A Framework for Monitoring and Responding to Online Comments About Your Graduate Medical Education Program.

U.S. Embassy Lima PAS Annual Program Statement (DOS)

U.S. Embassy Lima PAS Annual Program Statement (DOS)

Ukrainian Theme in the Documents of Czech Civic Initiatives During the Second Half of the 1980s.

The authors analyzed the presence and content of Ukrainian theme in the documents of Czech civic initiatives during the second half of the 1980s. The development of citizens initiatives has become a catalyst of socio-political life in Czechoslovakia. The number of participants in civic initiatives increased, and their programs were politicized. In program statements the principle of the so-called leading role of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was rejected as inconsistent with the principle of equality of citizens and the code of civil and political rights. The source base of this research comprised documents and materials of human rights activists, first presented in the self-published (samizdat) bulletins of independent Czech civic initiatives: “Information on Charter 77” (“Informace o Chartĕ 77”), “The Case of the East European News Agency” (“Zprava vychodoevropske informačni agentury”) and “Bulletin of Independent Peace Commonwealth – Initiative for demilitarization of society” (“Bulletin nezavisleho miroveho sdruženi – Iniciativy za demilitarizaci společnosti”). It has been shown that the Ukrainian theme is presented in two documents of the human rights association of Charter 77: the document “Before the Chernobyl Accident” (May 6, 1986) and the telegram of Czechoslovak human rights activists to Lviv, addressed to the group “Dovira” (“Trust”) (April 22, 1989). Czech “Independent Peace Commonwealth – Initiative for demilitarization of society” and Ukrainian, Lviv, “Dovira” Group, exchanged a letter and a telegram of solidarity. The informational reasons for creating the documents were the Chernobyl disaster – man-made accident on a global scale and the brutal dispersal of a peaceful demonstration in Lviv. Documents of Czech human rights activists and pacifist activists focus public attention on late Soviet realities: concealment of information from society about radioactive contamination and another human rights violation in Soviet Ukraine

SMBFL: slice-based cost reduction of mutation-based fault localization

Fault localization is one of the most important and difficult tasks in the software debugging process. Therefore, several methods have been proposed to automate and improve this process. Mutation-based fault localization is one of the states of the art techniques that try to locate faults by executing different mutants of the faulty program. In addition to favorable results, it is along with a massive increase in mutation execution cost. In this paper, we propose a new mutation-based fault localization approach called SMBFL, that aim to reduce the execution cost by reducing the number of statements to be mutated. As fewer mutants execute with SMBFL, the whole process will become faster and the cost will decrease. SMBFL only examines the statements in the dynamic slice of the program under test. The statements that present in the dynamic slice have a direct effect on the execution of the program with the specified test case. In the SMBFL method, the suspiciousness score of program statements is measured based on the entropy of their mutants. The proposed formula, MuEn, determines the suspiciousness score based on the result of executing mutants of each statement of the program. SMBFL is evaluated during a series of tests. The results show a relative increase in the accuracy of fault localization, by an average of 14.2%, and a decrease in the execution time of the fault localization process, by an average of 24.3%. Finally, the MuEn formula applies the least execution overhead to the fault localization process.