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

软件系统的显著特征之一是它们不断演变：新的补丁致力于软件存储库，新版本不断发布给用户。不幸的是，这些变化中的许多带来了破坏系统稳定性或影响其安全性的意想不到的故障，用户面临着令人不快的选择，要么使用错过最新功能和错误修复的旧的稳定版本，要么升级到以某些方式改进软件的新版本，结果只会引入其他错误和安全漏洞。在这次的团契中，我计划研究用于提高不断发展的软件的可靠性和安全性的新技术，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：理解软件如何演变，特别是不正确的更新对软件演变的影响；解决多版本执行的技术挑战，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；以及确定多版本执行对实践中遇到的不同类型的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.