Automatic Testing for Robustness Violations

Summary

Detecting programming errors in component-based systems can be difficult and very expensive. Due to the trend in outsourcing the development of software, companies are deploying more third-party software for mission critical systems. Hence, there is an increased need to assess the robustness and security of software. The traditional way of supporting component-oriented programming is to provide components in the form of shared libraries. In this chapter we describe a tool called HEALERS that can detect programming errors and security vulnerabilities in third-party libraries without source code access. A major advantage of our approach is that it is highly automated and could be used by component users who have little knowledge about the internals of a library.