Related papers: Towards Automated Application-Specific Software St…

Code bloat widely exists in production-run software. Left untackled, it not only degrades software performance but also increases its attack surface. In this work, we conduct a case study to understand this issue in statically linked…

Programs are bloated. Our study shows that only 5% of libc is used on average across the Ubuntu Desktop environment (2016 programs); the heaviest user, vlc media player, only needed 18%. In this paper: (1) We present a debloating framework…

Modern software systems heavily use C/C++ based libraries. Because of the weak memory model of C/C++, libraries may suffer from vulnerabilities which can expose the applications to potential attacks. For example, a very large number of…

Since the early days of the Web, web application developers have aspired to develop much of their applications declaratively. However, one aspect of the application, namely its business-logic is constantly left imperative. In this work we…

Creating and maintaining a modern, heterogeneous set of client applications remains an obstacle for many businesses and individuals. While simple domain-specific graphical languages and libraries can empower a variety of users to create…

There is a trend towards increased specialization of data management software for performance reasons. In this paper, we study the automatic specialization and optimization of database application programs -- sequences of queries and…

Automated detection of software vulnerabilities is critical for enhancing security, yet existing methods often struggle with the complexity and diversity of modern codebases. In this paper, we introduce EnStack, a novel ensemble stacking…

Developers today use significant amounts of open source code, surfacing the need for ways to automatically audit and upgrade library dependencies, and giving rise to the subfield of Software Composition Analysis (SCA). SCA products are…

Modern software systems are increasingly dependent on third-party libraries. It is widely recognized that using mature and well-tested third-party libraries can improve developers' productivity, reduce time-to-market, and produce more…

Cross-app collaboration via inter-component communication is a fundamental mechanism on Android. Although it brings the benefits such as functionality reuse and data sharing, a threat called component hijacking is also introduced. By…

Context: Refactoring is recognized as an effective practice to maintain evolving software systems. For software libraries, we study how library developers refactor their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), especially when it impacts…

Many tools and libraries are readily available to build and operate distributed Web applications. While the setup of operational environments is comparatively easy, practice shows that their continuous secure operation is more difficult to…

Open-source matters, not just to the current cohort of HPC users but also to potential new HPC communities, such as machine learning, themselves often rooted in open-source. Many of these potential new workloads are, by their very nature,…

Memory corruption vulnerabilities are endemic to unsafe languages, such as C, and they can even be found in safe languages that themselves are implemented in unsafe languages or linked with libraries implemented in unsafe languages. Robust…

Fast numerical libraries have been a cornerstone of scientific computing for decades, but this comes at a price. Programs may be tied to vendor specific software ecosystems resulting in polluted, non-portable code. As we enter an era of…

Multitier programming languages reduce the complexity of developing distributed systems by developing the distributed system in a single coherent code base. The compiler or the runtime separate the code for the components of the distributed…

Systematically developing high--quality reusable software components is a difficult task and requires careful design to find a proper balance between potential reuse, functionalities and ease of implementation. Extendibility is an important…

Developers frequently reuse APIs from existing libraries to implement certain functionality. However, learning APIs is difficult due to their large scale and complexity. In this paper, we design an abstract framework NLI2Code to ease the…

Oftentimes, there is a need to experiment with different programming languages and technologies when designing software applications. Such experiments must be reproducible and share-able within a team workplace, and manual effort should be…

The prevalent use of third-party libraries (TPLs) in modern software development introduces significant security and compliance risks, necessitating the implementation of Software Composition Analysis (SCA) to manage these threats. However,…