Cost-Aware Automatic Program Repair

Abstract

Abstract. We present a formal framework for repairing infinite-state, imperative, sequential programs, with (possibly recursive) procedures and multiple assertions; the framework can generate repaired programs by modifying the original erroneous program in multiple program locations, and can ensure the readability of the repaired program using user-defined expression templates; the framework also generates a set of inductive assertions that serve as a proof of correctness of the repaired program. As a step toward integrating programmer intent and intuition in automated program repair, we present a cost-aware formulationgiven a cost function associated with permissible statement modifications, the goal is to ensure that the total program modification cost does not exceed a given repair budget. As part of our predicate abstractionbased solution framework, we present a sound and complete algorithm for repair of Boolean programs. We have developed a prototype tool based on SMT solving and used it successfully to repair diverse errors in benchmark C programs.

Automatic patch generation by learning correct code

“…Aut-oFixE leverages developer-provided formal specifications (e.g., post-condtions, pre-conditions, and invariants) to automatically find and generate repairs for defects. Cost-aware Program Repair [30] abstracts a C program as a boolean constraint, repairs the constraint based on a cost model, and then concretizes the constraint back to a repaired C program. The goal is to find a repaired program that satisfies all assertions in the program with minimal modification cost.…”

“…• Large Applications: Unlike many previous patch generation systems, which work with small programs with hundreds of lines of code [14,23,30,31], Prophet generates correct patches for large, real-world applications with tens of thousands to a million lines of code or more. The previous state-of-the-art system for such applications uses a set of manually derived heuristics to rank candidate patches [18].…”

Deductive Program Repair

“…as a branch of a conditional). Samanta et al [20] propose abstracting a C program with a boolean constraint, repairing this constraint so that all assertions in the program are satisfied by repeatedly applying to it update schemas according to a cost model, then concretize the boolean constraint back to a repaired C program. Their approach needs developer intervention to define the cost model for each program, as well as at the concretization step.…”

“…The task of repair consists of automatically generating an alternative implementation that meets the specification. The repair problem has been studied in the past for reactive and pushdown systems [8,10,11,19,20,26]. We view repair as generalizing, for example, the choose construct of complete functional synthesis [15], sketching [21,22], and program templates [23], because the exact location and nature of expressions to be synthesized is left to the algorithm.…”

Automatic Software Repair

“…Griesmayer et al [58] repair a specific class of programs called boolean programs: those that only contain boolean variables. Further work has been done on repairing boolean programs [149]. Son et al [167] repairs access-control policies in web applications, using a static analysis and transformations tailored to this domain.…”