Related papers: Demystifying and Assessing Code Understandability …

Prior work on code comprehension uses different comprehension proxies-for example, Likert-scale ratings or answers to input-output questions about program snippets, usually collected from students, to approximate whether code is…

Code cloning plays a very important role in open-source software engineering. The presence of clones within a project may indicate a need for refactoring, and clones between projects are even more interesting, since code migration takes…

Software obfuscation or obscuring a software is an approach to defeat the practice of reverse engineering a software for using its functionality illegally in the development of another software. Java applications are more amenable to…

Developers spend a large portion of their time and effort on comprehending source code. While many studies have investigated how developers approach these comprehension tasks and what factors influence their success, less is known about how…

Program comprehension concerns the ability of an individual to make an understanding of an existing software system to extend or transform it. Software systems comprise of data that are noisy and missing, which makes program understanding…

Decompilers are fundamental tools for critical security tasks, from vulnerability discovery to malware analysis, yet their evaluation remains fragmented. Existing approaches primarily focus on syntactic correctness through synthetic…

Duplicated code has a negative impact on the quality of software systems and should be detected at least. In this paper, we discuss an approach that improves source code retrieval using the structural information about the programs. We…

Decompilers are important tools for reverse engineers that help them analyze software at a higher level of abstraction than assembly code. Unfortunately, because compilation is lossy, deterministic decompilers produce code that is missing…

The rapid rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has changed software development, with tools like Copilot, JetBrains AI Assistant, and others boosting developers' productivity. However, developers now spend more time reviewing code than…

The problem of reversing the compilation process, decompilation, is an important tool in reverse engineering of computer software. Recently, researchers have proposed using techniques from neural machine translation to automate the process…

A C decompiler converts an executable into source code. The recovered C source code, once re-compiled, is expected to produce an executable with the same functionality as the original executable. With over twenty years of development, C…

Be it in debugging, testing, code review or, more recently, pair programming with AI assistance: in all these activities, software engineers need to understand source code. Accordingly, plenty of research is taking place in the field to…

Analyzing third-party software such as malware or firmware is a crucial task for security analysts. Although various approaches for automatic analysis exist and are the subject of ongoing research, analysts often have to resort to manual…

Decomposition and abstraction is an essential component of computational thinking, yet it is not always emphasized in introductory programming courses. In addition, as generative AI further reduces the focus on syntax and increases the…

Decompilation is widely used in reverse engineering to recover high-level language code from binary executables. While recent approaches leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising progress, they typically treat assembly…

Context: Developers spend most of their time comprehending source code during software development. Automatically assessing how readable and understandable source code is can provide various benefits in different tasks, such as task…

Code search engines usually use readability feature to rank code snippets. There are several metrics to calculate this feature, but developers may have different perceptions about readability. Correlation between readability and…

Developers spend 70% of their time understanding code. Code that is easy to read can save time, while hard-to-read code can lead to the introduction of bugs. However, it is difficult to establish what makes code more understandable.…

Decompilation transforms low-level program languages (PL) (e.g., binary code) into high-level PLs (e.g., C/C++). It has been widely used when analysts perform security analysis on software (systems) whose source code is unavailable, such as…

Java Code Generation consists in generating automatically Java code from a Natural Language Text. This NLP task helps in increasing programmers' productivity by providing them with immediate solutions to the simplest and most repetitive…