PhD Dissertation Defense by MA Siqi | Automatic Vulnerability Detection and Repair

About The Talk

Vulnerability becomes a major threat to the security of many systems, including computer systems (e.g., Windows and Linux) and mobile systems (e.g., Android and iOS). Attackers can steal private information and perform harmful actions by exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities often remain undetected for a long time as they may not affect the typical functionalities of systems. Thus, it is important to detect and repair a vulnerability in time. However, it is often difficult for a developer to detect and repair a vulnerability correctly and timely if he/she is not a security expert. Fortunately, automatic repair approaches significantly assist developers to deal with different types of vulnerabilities. There are lots of work to detect different vulnerabilities, and only few vulnerability repair approaches are proposed to repair certain types of vulnerabilities. In this dissertation, we are able to propose schemes to repair the vulnerabilities by employing the present automatic vulnerability repair schemes; 2) generating repair patterns of vulnerabilities automatically. The proposed repair methodologies are applicable to not only one type of vulnerability, but rather various kinds of vulnerabilities. The proposed schemes are implemented as a prototype, which can be used to automatically repair different vulnerabilities.

Speaker Biography

Siqi MA is currently a final year PhD candidate in SIS, SMU. Her research focuses on Software Security, particularly on vulnerability analysis, detection, and repair. She is supervised by Professor Robert H. Deng and Associate Professor David Lo. From 2015-2016, she was a visiting Ph.D student at Carnegie Mellon University.