MIT System Fixes Software Bugs Without Access To Source Code

Posted by Soulskill on Monday June 29, 2015 @04:28AM from the copies-solutions-from-stack-overflow dept.

jan_jes writes: MIT researchers have presented a new system at the Association for Computing Machinery's Programming Language Design and Implementation conference that repairs software bugs by automatically importing functionality from other, more secure applications. According to MIT, "The system, dubbed CodePhage, doesn't require access to the source code of the applications. Instead, it analyzes the applications' execution and characterizes the types of security checks they perform. As a consequence, it can import checks from applications written in programming languages other than the one in which the program it's repairing was written."

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Re:Hmmm .... by Anonymous Coward · 2015-06-29 05:04 · Score: 2, Interesting

Also: Versioning.
VERSIONING, VERSIONING, VERSIONING, VERSIONING...
What is your version number after this 'fix'? This seems like a nice way to fork off yet another forked fork of a forked codebase, except now we're forking binaries as well as sources.
Y'know those "Warranty Void If Removed" stickers they put on electronics? Y'know those painted tamper-proof screws they put in your Mac? They put those there to stop you fucking around inside the box, because you can easily fuck things up and they won't know how to fix it. A binary file has an implied "Warranty Void If Removed" sticker on it. You fucked with it. Good luck.