Advanced Software Analysis (Autumn 2024)

Abstract

This course aims at making students proficient in a wide range of skills required to develop tools that automatically analyse software and to use advanced type systems for safe programming. Both of these are employed in modern software development to ensure software quality and security in the face of ever-increasing complexity.

Description

This course is the final course for the Software Analysis specialisation. It gets students as close as possible to the current research in the field.

The course is split in three parts. The first part focuses on programming in the language Idris. Idris is a dependently typed functional programming language, which means that the type system can express properties of programs. We will see how to use this for type driven development, a style of programming where the compiler is used as a tool to ensure correctness of programs. 

In the second part, we will discuss how we can safely program concurrent/distributed systems. Our main focus will be on session types, a specification language for distributed protocols. We will use session types for verifying that communicating processes never reach communication errors or deadlocks. We will touch both theoretical and applied aspects: we will learn algorithms for checking code correctness and study implementations of session types in mainstream programming languages. 

In the third part of the course, we focus on three topics in intelligent methods for testing and fixing programs: synthesis of test data using satisfiability solving (satisfiability-modulo-theory), synthesis of high-coverage test data using symbolic execution, and automatic program repair (generating patches). We investigate the operating principles of these tools and learn to use them on case study programs.

Formal prerequisites

• Having taken the course Modelling Languages and Systems.
• Experience with developing software;

Intended learning outcomes

After the course, the student should be able to:

• Use and discuss advanced type systems for safe software development
• Formally specify properties of programs and data using types and logics
• Use techniques for analysing and repairing programs
• Discuss and characterise some recent developments in programming languages and verification technology
• Use techniques for automatic generation of high-quality test data for programs

Ordinary exam

Exam type:
D: Submission of written work with following oral, External (7-point scale)
Exam variation:
D2G: Submission for groups with following oral exam supplemented by the submission. Shared responsibility for the report.