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One vision for program synthesis, and specifically for programming by example (PBE), is an interactive programmer's assistant, integrated into the development environment. To make program synthesis practical for interactive use, prior work on Small-Step Live PBE has proposed to limit the scope of synthesis to small code snippets, and enable the users to provide local specifications for those snippets. This paradigm, however, does not work well in the presence of loops. We present LooPy, a synthesizer integrated into a live programming environment, which extends Small-Step Live PBE to work inside loops and scales it up to synthesize larger code snippets, while remaining fast enough for interactive use. To allow users to effectively provide examples at various loop iterations, even when the loop body is incomplete, LooPy makes use oflive execution, a technique that leverages the programmer as an oracle to step over incomplete parts of the loop. To enable synthesis of loop bodies at interactive speeds, LooPy introducesIntermediate State Graph, a new data structure, which compactly represents a large space of code snippets composed of multiple assignment statements and conditionals. We evaluate LooPy empirically using benchmarks from competitive programming and previous synthesizers, and show that it can solve a wide variety of synthesis tasks at interactive speeds. We also perform a small qualitative user study which shows that LooPy'sblock-levelspecifications are easy for programmers to provide.
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Function Extraction: A New Paradigm for Producing Secure Code
Function Extraction (FX) is a new and evolving paradigm for the production of secure computer codes. It is, in effect, the inverse of formal verification as it analyzes code to produce a mathematical specification of its behavior. This has the potential for identifying unwanted or unexpected behaviors and has the potential for analyzing unknown or “found” code artifacts such as malware. The effort is enabled by recent developments in loop analysis that allow invariant relations to be developed for loop bodies enabling the loop function to be discovered. The paper defines program behavior as a mathematical description of the effects of program execution on the environment in which the program runs and continues with a discussion of its current status. As FX is an evolving paradigm, areas in which work remains to be done are discussed and examples of the results of two prototype analyzers are given. The paper concludes with a discussion of the path forward and the work that remains to be done.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2043104
- PAR ID:
- 10539244
- Editor(s):
- Rhode, Matilda; Simmons, Kent
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- function extraction secure code security paradigms
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Bedford, PA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
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- The DOI is not currently available.
