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Fuzz testing is a fundamental technique employed to identify vulnerabilities within software systems. However, the process can be protracted and resource-intensive, especially when confronted with extensive codebases. In this work, I…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-12-12 Saket Upadhyay

Multi-robot swarms play an essential role in complex missions including battlefield reconnaissance, agricultural pest monitoring, as well as disaster search and rescue. Unfortunately, given the complexity of swarm algorithms, logical…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Ruoyu Zhou , Zhiwei Zhang , Haocheng Han , Xiaodong Zhang , Zehan Chen , Jun Sun , Yulong Shen , Dehai Xu

Neutral landscapes and mutational robustness are believed to be important enablers of evolvability in biology. We apply these concepts to software, defining mutational robustness to be the fraction of random mutations that leave a program's…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2013-06-28 Eric Schulte , Zachary P. Fry , Ethan Fast , Westley Weimer , Stephanie Forrest

Ecological networks such as plant-pollinator systems and food webs vary in space and time. This variability includes fluctuations in global network properties such as total number and intensity of interactions but also in the local…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2022-12-23 Tancredi Caruso , Giulio Virginio Clemente , Matthias C Rillig , Diego Garlaschelli

Many software projects employ manual code review to gatekeep defects and vulnerabilities in the code before integration. However, reviewers often work under time pressure and rely primarily on static inspection, leaving the dynamic aspects…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Wachiraphan Charoenwet , Patanamon Thongtanunam , Van-Thuan Pham , Christoph Treude

Fuzzing is an automated software testing technique broadly adopted by the industry. A popular variant is mutation-based fuzzing, which discovers a large number of bugs in practice. While the research community has studied mutation-based…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-10-24 Patrick Jauernig , Domagoj Jakobovic , Stjepan Picek , Emmanuel Stapf , Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi

The Software Naturalness hypothesis argues that programming languages can be understood through the same techniques used in natural language processing. We explore this hypothesis through the use of a pre-trained transformer-based language…

The long-term sustainability of research software is a critical challenge, as it usually suffers from poor maintainability, lack of adaptability, and eventual obsolescence. This paper proposes a novel approach to addressing this issue by…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-15 Philipp Zech , Irdin Pekaric

Vulnerabilities in open-source operating systems (OSs) pose substantial security risks to software systems, making their detection crucial. While fuzzing has been an effective vulnerability detection technique in various domains, OS fuzzing…

Operating Systems · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Kun Hu , Qicai Chen , Wenzhuo Zhang , Zilong Lu , Bihuan Chen , You Lu , Haowen Jiang , Bingkun Sun , Xin Peng , Wenyun Zhao

Software's pervasive impact and increasing reliance in the era of digital transformation raise concerns about vulnerabilities, emphasizing the need for software security. Fuzzy testing is a dynamic analysis software testing technique that…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-07-22 Tiago Dias , Eva Maia , Isabel Praça

Online social networks have become an integral aspect of our daily lives and play a crucial role in shaping our relationships with others. However, bugs and glitches, even minor ones, can cause anything from frustrating problems to serious…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Francisco Zanartu , Christoph Treude , Markus Wagner

Fuzzing is an effective technique for discovering software vulnerabilities by generating random test inputs and executing them against the target program. However, fuzzing large and complex programs remains challenging due to difficulties…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Dongdong She , Adam Storek , Yuchong Xie , Seoyoung Kweon , Prashast Srivastava , Suman Jana

Mainstream software applications and tools are the configurable platforms with an enormous number of parameters along with their values. Certain settings and possible interactions between these parameters may harden (or soften) the security…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-06-17 Shuvalaxmi Dass , Akbar Siami Namin

Security vulnerabilities play a vital role in network security system. Fuzzing technology is widely used as a vulnerability discovery technology to reduce damage in advance. However, traditional fuzzing techniques have many challenges, such…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-08-20 Yan Wang , Peng Jia , Luping Liu , Jiayong Liu

Greybox fuzzing is one of the most useful and effective techniques for the bug detection in large scale application programs. It uses minimal amount of instrumentation. American Fuzzy Lop (AFL) is a popular coverage based evolutionary…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-12 Ketan Patil , Aditya Kanade

Embedded Network Stacks (ENS) enable low-resource devices to communicate with the outside world, facilitating the development of the Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems. Some defects in ENS are thus high-severity cybersecurity…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-08-23 Paschal C. Amusuo , Ricardo Andrés Calvo Méndez , Zhongwei Xu , Aravind Machiry , James C. Davis

Context: Scientific open-source software (SciOSS) plays a foundational role in research and engineering, yet its long-term sustainability has often been overlooked and remains a significant concern. Objective: This study investigates the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Sheikh Md. Mushfiqur Rahman , Gregory R. Watson , Nasir U. Eisty

Modern embedded Linux devices, such as routers, IP cameras, and IoT gateways, rely on complex software stacks where numerous daemons interact to provide services. Testing these devices is crucial from a security perspective since vendors…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Alessio Izzillo , Riccardo Lazzeretti , Emilio Coppa

Cyber-physical systems come with increasingly complex architectures and failure modes, which complicates the task of obtaining accurate system reliability models. At the same time, with the emergence of the (industrial) Internet-of-Things,…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2019-09-16 Alexis Linard , Doina Bucur , Marielle Stoelinga

Testing has become an indispensable activity of software development, yet writing good and relevant tests remains a quite challenging task. One well-known problem is that it often is impossible or unrealistic to test for every outcome, as…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2017-08-18 Dimitri Racordon , Didier Buchs