Researchers Add Software Bugs To Reduce the Number of Software Bugs (networkworld.com)

Reader alphadogg writes: Researchers are adding bugs to experimental software code in order to ultimately wind up with programs that have fewer vulnerabilities. The idea is to insert a known quantity of vulnerabilities into code, then see how many of them are discovered by bug-finding tools. By analyzing the reasons bugs escape detection, developers can create more effective bug-finders, according to researchers at New York University in collaboration with others from MIT's Lincoln Laboratory and Northeastern University. They created large-scale automated vulnerability addition (LAVA), which is a low-cost technique that adds the vulnerabilities."The only way to evaluate a bug finder is to control the number of bugs in a program, which is exactly what we do with LAVA," says Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, a computer science and engineering professor at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering.

Comments

Re:This is NOT a new thing.

[The-Ixian]

Actually, is there anything that can be considered "new"?

Everything is just a rehash of stuff we have done before.

You might say that technology is new... but is it really? Technology is just a different way of doing the same old things like communicating with each other and building communities.

All "new" ideas are really just reboots of old ideas.