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Because of constraints imposed by the market, embedded software in consumer electronics is almost inevitably shipped with faults and the goal is just to reduce the inherent unreliability to an acceptable level before a product has to be…

To counter software reverse engineering or tampering, software obfuscation tools can be used. However, such tools to a large degree hard-code how the obfuscations are deployed. They hence lack resilience and stealth in the face of many…

Malware writers have employed various obfuscation and polymorphism techniques to thwart static analysis approaches and bypassing antivirus tools. Dynamic analysis techniques, however, have essentially overcome these deceits by observing the…

Deobfuscating JavaScript (JS) code poses a significant challenge in web security, particularly as obfuscation techniques are frequently used to conceal malicious activities within scripts. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently…

Background: Unsupervised machine learners have been increasingly applied to software defect prediction. It is an approach that may be valuable for software practitioners because it reduces the need for labeled training data. Objective:…

In the past couple of decades, significant research efforts have been devoted to the prediction of software bugs (i.e., defects). In general, these works leverage a diverse set of metrics, tools, and techniques to predict which classes,…

In this paper we propose a set of guidelines to select a solver for the solution of nonlinear programming problems. With this in mind, we present a comparison of the convergence performances of commonly used solvers for both unconstrained…

The rapid escalation of applying Machine Learning (ML) in various domains has led to paying more attention to the quality of ML components. There is then a growth of techniques and tools aiming at improving the quality of ML components and…

The technical state of software, i.e., its technical debt (TD) and maintainability are of increasing interest as ever more software is developed and deployed. Since td and maintainability are neither uniformly defined, not easy to…

Deep learning (DL) techniques are on the rise in the software engineering research community. More and more approaches have been developed on top of DL models, also due to the unprecedented amount of software-related data that can be used…

Compilers can specialize programs having invariants for performance improvement. Detecting program invariants that span large and complex code, however, is difficult for compilers. Traditional compilers do not perform very expensive…

Co-change candidates are the group of code fragments that require a change if any of these fragments experience a modification in a commit operation during software evolution. The cloned co-change candidates are a subset of the co-change…

Bug finding tools can find defects in software source code us- ing an automated static analysis. This automation may be able to reduce the time spent for other testing and review activities. For this we need to have a clear understanding of…

Modern software relies on a multitude of automated testing and quality assurance tools to prevent errors, bugs and potential vulnerabilities. This study sets out to provide a head-to-head, quantitative and qualitative evaluation of six…

Code metrics are easy to define, but not so easy to justify. It is hard to prove that a metric is valid, i.e., that measured numerical values imply anything on the vaguely defined, yet crucial software properties such as complexity and…

With the rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) in automated code refactoring, assessing and ensuring functional equivalence between LLM-generated refactoring and the original implementation becomes critical. While prior work…

As quantum computing moves toward fault-tolerant architectures, quantum error correction (QEC) decoder performance is increasingly critical for scalability. Understanding the impact of transitioning from floating-point software to…

Many software development problems can be addressed by program analysis tools, which traditionally are based on precise, logical reasoning and heuristics to ensure that the tools are practical. Recent work has shown tremendous success…

Binary decompilation aims to recover binaries into high-level source code, but existing evaluations mainly rely on syntactic similarity or single-axis readability metrics, which fail to capture practical reusability. We propose a…

CONTEXT: There has been a rapid growth in the use of data analytics to underpin evidence-based software engineering. However the combination of complex techniques, diverse reporting standards and poorly understood underlying phenomena are…