Multi-version Execution Techniques for Increasing the Reliability and Security of Evolving Software

软件系统的一个显著特征是它们的进化：新的补丁被提交到软件存储库，新的版本被持续地发布给用户。不幸的是，许多这些变化带来了意想不到的失败，破坏了系统的稳定性或影响其安全性，用户面临着不舒服的选择，是使用一个旧的稳定版本，它错过了最近的功能和错误修复，升级到一个新版本，在某些方面改进了软件，只会引入其他错误和安全漏洞。在这个研究项目中，我计划研究改进不断发展的软件的可靠性和安全性的新技术，基于将多个软件版本的执行结合起来的想法，以增加“多版本”应用程序的可靠性和安全性，并消除软件更新带来的大量常见错误。这是一个雄心勃勃的提议，它提出了跨越软件工程、计算机系统和安全领域的几个挑战：理解软件是如何进化的，特别是不正确的更新对软件进化的影响；解决多版本执行的技术挑战，例如创建应用程序级沙箱环境和设计轻量级记录和重放技术；设计有效结合不同软件版本的错误恢复策略；并确定多版本执行对实践中遇到的不同类型应用程序和代码更改的适用性。

One of the distinguishing characteristics of software systems is that they evolve: new patches are committed to software repositories and new versions are released to users on a continuous basis. Unfortunately, many of these changes bring unexpected failures that break the stability of the system or affect its security, and users face the uncomfortable choice between using an old stable version which misses recent features and bug fixes, and upgrading to a new version which improves the software in certain ways, only to introduce other bugs and security vulnerabilities.In this fellowship, I plan to investigate novel techniques for improving the reliability and security of evolving software, based on the idea of combining the execution of multiple software versions in such a way as to increase the reliability and security of the "multi-version" application and eliminate a large number of common bugs introduced by software updates.This is an ambitious proposal, which presents several challenges spanning the areas of software engineering, computer systems, and security: understanding how software evolves, and particularly the effects of incorrect updates on software evolution; addressing the technical challenges of multi-version execution such as creating an application-level sandboxing environment and devising lightweight record and replay techniques; designing error recovery strategies that effectively combine different software versions; and determining the applicability of multi-version execution to the different types of applications and code changes encountered in practice.