Related papers: Is It Safe to Uplift This Patch? An Empirical Stud…

Effectively managing and resolving software issues is critical for maintaining and evolving software systems. Development teams often rely on issue trackers and issue reports to track and manage the work needed during issue resolution,…

During the rapid development cycle for Internet products (websites and mobile apps), new features are developed and rolled out to users constantly. Features with code defects or design flaws can cause outages and significant degradation of…

Maintaining software is an ongoing process that stretches beyond the initial release. Stable software versions continuously evolve to fix bugs, add improvements, address security issues, and ensure compatibility. This ongoing support…

We focus on the problem of adding fault-tolerance to an existing concurrent protocol in the presence of {\em unchangeable environment actions}. Such unchangeable actions occur in practice due to several reasons. One instance includes the…

It is widely recognized that program repair tools need to have a high precision to be useful, i.e., the generated patches need to have a high probability to be correct. However, it is fundamentally difficult to ensure the correctness of the…

Password updates are a critical account security measure and an essential part of the password lifecycle. Service providers and common security recommendations advise users to update their passwords in response to incidents or as a critical…

Several disastrous security attacks can be attributed to delays in patching software vulnerabilities. While researchers and practitioners have paid significant attention to automate vulnerabilities identification and patch development…

Despite the immense popularity of the Automated Program Repair (APR) field, the question of patch validation is still open. Most of the present-day approaches follow the so-called Generate-and-Validate approach, where first a candidate…

Source code repositories allow developers to manage multiple versions (or branches) of a software system. Pull-requests are used to modify a branch, and backporting is a regular activity used to port changes from a current development…

Promptly porting patches from a source codebase to its variants (e.g., forks and branches) is essential for mitigating propagated defects and vulnerabilities. Recent studies have explored automated patch porting to reduce manual effort and…

Software bugs pose an ever-present concern for developers, and patching such bugs requires a considerable amount of costs through complex operations. In contrast, introducing bugs can be an effortless job, in that even a simple mutation can…

The informativeness of security-related commit messages is crucial for patch triage: when high, it enables the rapid distribution and deployment of security fixes. Prior research (Reis et al., 2023) reported, however, that commit messages…

In many applications of machine learning (ML), updates are performed with the goal of enhancing model performance. However, current practices for updating models rely solely on isolated, aggregate performance analyses, overlooking important…

With Firefox OS, Mozilla is making a serious push for an HTML5-based mobile platform. In order to assuage security concerns over providing hardware access to web applications, Mozilla has introduced a number of mechanisms that make the…

We present a study that characterizes the way developers use automatically generated patches when fixing software defects. Our study tasked two groups of developers with repairing defects in C programs. Both groups were provided with the…

A hot fix is an unplanned improvement to a specific time-critical issue deployed to a software system in production. While hot fixing is an essential and common activity in software maintenance, it has never been surveyed as a research…

Patch fuzzing is a technique aimed at identifying vulnerabilities that arise from newly patched code. While researchers have made efforts to apply patch fuzzing to testing JavaScript engines with considerable success, these efforts have…

Embedded software is developed under the assumption that hardware execution is always correct. Fault attacks break and exploit that assumption. Through the careful introduction of targeted faults, an adversary modifies the control-flow or…

Open-source software vulnerability patch detection is a critical component for maintaining software security and ensuring software supply chain integrity. Traditional manual detection methods face significant scalability challenges when…

In the multi-commit development model, programmers complete tasks (e.g., implementing a feature) by organizing their work in several commits and packaging them into a commit-set. Analyzing data from developers using this model can be useful…