No abstract

No abstract

Programs are not text; they are hierarchical compositions of computational structures and should be edited, executed, and debugged in an environment that consistently acknowledges and reinforces this viewpoint. The Cornell Program Synthesizer demands a structural perspective at all stages of program development. Its separate features are unified by a common foundation: a grammar for the programming language. Its full-screen derivation-tree editor and syntax-directed diagnostic interpreter combine to make the Synthesizer a powerful and responsive interactive programming tool.

A syntax-directed editor is a tool for structured program development. Such an editor can enforce syntactic correctness incrementally by restricting editing operations to legitimate modifica-

Abstract. CodeSurfer/x86 is a prototype system for analyzing x86 executables. It uses a static-analysis algorithm called value-set analysis (VSA) to recover intermediate representations that are similar to those that a compiler creates for a program written in a high-level language. A major challenge in building an analysis tool for executables is in providing useful information about operations involving memory. This is difficult when symbol-table and debugging information is absent or untrusted. CodeSurfer/x86 overcomes these challenges to provide an analyst with a powerful and flexible platform for investigating the properties and behaviors of potentially malicious code (such as COTS components, plugins, mobile code, worms, Trojans, and virus-infected code) using (i) CodeSurfer/x86's GUI, (ii) CodeSurfer/x86's scripting language, which provides access to all of the intermediate representations that CodeSurfer/x86 builds for the executable, and (iii) GrammaTech's Path Inspector, which is a tool that uses a sophisticated pattern-matching engine to answer questions about the flow of execution in a program.