Campus Event Calendar
Event Entry
What and Who
WYSINWYX: What You See Is Not What You eXecute
Thomas Reps
University of Wisconsin and GrammaTech, Inc.
SWS Distinguished Lecture Series - Spring
Thomas W. Reps is Professor of Computer Science in the Computer Sciences
Department of the University of Wisconsin, which he joined in 1985.
Reps is the author or co-author of three books and more than one hundred
forty papers describing his research (see http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~reps/).
His work has concerned a wide variety of topics, including program slicing,
dataflow analysis, pointer analysis, model checking, computer security,
code instrumentation, language-based program-development environments,
the use of program profiling in software testing, software renovation,
incremental algorithms, and attribute grammars. (Click here for a summary
of his recent research activities, here for a summary of some of his past
research activities, and here for his C.V..)
His collaboration with Professor Tim Teitelbaum at Cornell University from
1978 to 1985 led to the creation of two systems -- the Cornell Program
Synthesizer and the Synthesizer Generator -- that explored how to build
interactive programming tools that incorporate knowledge about the programming
language being supported. Reps is also President of GrammaTech, Inc., which he
and Teitelbaum founded in 1988 to commercialize this work.
Since 1985, Professor Reps has been co-leader, with Professor Susan Horwitz,
of a research group at the University of Wisconsin that has carried out many
investigations of program slicing and its applications in software engineering.
His most recent work concerns program analysis, computer security, and software
model checking. In 1996, Reps served as a consultant to DARPA to help them plan
a project aimed at reducing the impact of the Year 2000 Problem on the U.S.
Department of Defense. In 2003, he served on the F/A-22 Avionics Advisory Team,
which provided advice to the U.S. Department of Defense about problems uncovered
during integration testing of the plane's avionics software.
Professor Reps received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1982.
His Ph.D. dissertation won the 1983 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.
Reps's 1988 paper on interprocedural slicing, with Susan Horwitz and his then-student
David Binkley, was selected as one of the 50 most influential papers from the ACM SIGPLAN
Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), 1979-99. His
2004 paper about analysis of assembly code, with his student Gogul Balakrishnan,
received the ETAPS Best-Paper Award for 2004 from the European Association for
Programming Languages and Systems (EAPLS). His 2008 paper about a system for generating
static analyzers for machine instructions, with his student Junghee Lim, received the
ETAPS Best-Paper Award for 2008 from EAPLS. In 2003, Reps was recognized as a
``Highly Cited Researcher'' in the field of Computer Science -- one of 230 worldwide who
received such recognition by the Institute for Scientific Information. In March 2008,
Reps was third on Microsoft Libra's list of most-highly-cited authors in the field of
Software Engineering and Progamming Languages.
Reps has also been the recipient of an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award (1986),
a Packard Fellowship (1988), a Humboldt Research Award (2000), and a Guggenheim Fellowship
(2000). Reps is also an ACM Fellow (2005).
AG 1, AG 2, AG 3, AG 4, AG 5, SWS, RG1, RG2
Expert Audience
English
Note: We use this to send email in the morning.
Date, Time and Location
Monday, 5 May 2008
11:00
60 Minutes
E1 5
019
Saarbrücken
Abstract
What You See Is Not What You eXecute: computers do not execute
source-code programs; they execute machine-code programs that are
generated from source code. Not only can the WYSINWYX phenomenon
create a mismatch between what a programmer intends and what is
actually executed by the processor, it can cause analyses that are
performed on source code -- the approach followed by most
program-analysis tools -- to fail to detect bugs and security
vulnerabilities.
To address the WYSINWYX problem, we have developed algorithms to
recover information from stripped executables about the memory-access
operations that the program performs. These algorithms are used in
the CodeSurfer/x86 tool to construct intermediate representations that
are used for browsing, inspecting, and analyzing stripped x86
executables.
Joint work with G. Balakrishnan (NEC), J. Lim (UW), and T. Teitelbaum
(Cornell and GrammaTech, Inc.).
source-code programs; they execute machine-code programs that are
generated from source code. Not only can the WYSINWYX phenomenon
create a mismatch between what a programmer intends and what is
actually executed by the processor, it can cause analyses that are
performed on source code -- the approach followed by most
program-analysis tools -- to fail to detect bugs and security
vulnerabilities.
To address the WYSINWYX problem, we have developed algorithms to
recover information from stripped executables about the memory-access
operations that the program performs. These algorithms are used in
the CodeSurfer/x86 tool to construct intermediate representations that
are used for browsing, inspecting, and analyzing stripped x86
executables.
Joint work with G. Balakrishnan (NEC), J. Lim (UW), and T. Teitelbaum
(Cornell and GrammaTech, Inc.).
Contact
Brigitta Hansen
0681 - 9325200
--email hidden
Video Broadcast
Yes
Kaiserslautern
32
349
passcode not visible
logged in users only
Brigitta Hansen, 04/25/2008 15:02 -- Created document.