Semantic-aware Method Research Articles

Assume, guarantee or repair: a regular framework for non regular properties

We present Assume-Guarantee-Repair (AGR)—a novel framework which verifies that a program satisfies a set of properties and also repairs the program in case the verification fails. We consider communicating programs—these are simple C-like programs, extended with synchronous actions over communication channels. Our method, which consists of a learning-based approach to assume–guarantee reasoning, performs verification and repair simultaneously: in every iteration, AGR either makes another step towards proving that the (current) system satisfies the required properties, or alters the system in a way that brings it closer to satisfying the properties. To handle infinite-state systems we build finite abstractions, for which we check the satisfaction of complex properties that contain first-order constraints, using both syntactic and semantic-aware methods. We implemented AGR and evaluated it on various communication protocols. Our experiments present compact proofs of correctness and quick repairs.

A Semantic-aware method for polymorphic signature generation

It is difficult for security experts to generate polymorphic signatures by using traditional string mining and matching techniques. A semantic-aware method is presented to generate a kind of two-level signature that includes both polymorphic semantics and string patterns. It first analyzes the characteristics of polymorphic engines and categorizes the data flows into different clusters and then uses static data flow methods to extract invariable semantic instructions. And then, it combines traditional string methods to generate the signature. In comparison with other methods, experimental results show that it may effectively reduce false positives and false negatives.