SBIR Phase I: OpenRefactory/C: An Infrastructure to Provide Automated Power Tools for C Programmers

SBIR 第一阶段：OpenRefactory/C：为 C 程序员提供自动化电动工具的基础设施

• 批准号: 1622201
• 负责人: Munawar Hafiz
• 金额: $ 22.5万
• 依托单位: OpenRefactory, Inc.
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-07-01 至 2017-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1622201&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SBIR; Phase; OpenRefactory; Infrastructure; Provide

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is about empowering C program developers with correct and complex program transformation tools that they can use to not only improve the quality of C programs but also make the programs more secure against well-known vulnerabilities. C, in spite of its popularity, has integrated development environments (IDEs) with a limited portfolio of such power tools, with limited scalability and limited applicability to real-world programs. Successfully addressing the limitations present in existing tools and providing a robust program transformation infrastructure should fundamentally change how developers work on C code since refactoring is an integral part of software development practices for other programming languages. This will impact both how C programs are written and how they are maintained and evolved. The proposed work also explored behavior-enhancing program transformations that can fix security vulnerabilities in C programs. The work on behavior-enhancing transformations should open a new paradigm of power tools that can be made available to programmers in general (not limited to C programmers).This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will foster the development of new algorithms and data structures needed to implement scalable, robust automated program transformation tools for C. It will focus on the parts of this problem that have been inadequately addressed in prior work - specifically, sound handling of the C preprocessor and deep program analysis. At the same time, the work will address the heterogeneity of C platforms, e.g., different dialects, different configurations based on underlying hardware, different IDEs, etc. The Principle Investigator led an NSF-supported research effort to address the research problems in the last three years and has developed a large research prototype (over 500 KLOC). The proposed work brings many of the research results to practice.

这个小型企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是为C程序开发人员提供正确和复杂的程序转换工具，他们不仅可以使用这些工具来提高C程序的质量，而且还可以使程序更安全地抵御众所周知的漏洞。C语言尽管很受欢迎，但它集成了开发环境（IDE）和有限的此类强大工具组合，可扩展性有限，对现实世界程序的适用性有限。成功解决现有工具中存在的局限性并提供强大的程序转换基础设施应该从根本上改变开发人员处理C代码的方式，因为重构是其他编程语言软件开发实践的一个组成部分。这将影响C程序的编写方式以及它们的维护和发展方式。拟议的工作还探讨了行为增强程序转换，可以修复C程序中的安全漏洞。行为增强转换方面的工作将为一般程序员（不限于C程序员）提供一种新的动力工具范例。这个小型企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目将促进新算法和数据结构的开发，这些算法和数据结构是实现可扩展的、健壮的C自动化程序转换工具所需的。它将集中在这个问题的部分，在以前的工作中没有得到充分的解决-特别是，健全的处理C预处理器和深入的程序分析。同时，这项工作将解决C平台的异构性，例如，不同的方言，基于底层硬件的不同配置，不同的IDE等。在过去的三年里，首席研究员领导了NSF支持的研究工作，以解决研究问题，并开发了一个大型研究原型（超过500 Kbps）。拟议的工作带来了许多研究成果的实践。