Automated Patch Impact Analysis (PATCH)

软件是不断发展的。软件变更是为了实现新特性、适应新的硬件和平台、修复错误和安全漏洞，或者改进非功能属性（如性能和能耗）。对软件变更引入的所有可能的新行为进行推理是很困难的。因此，软件变更（通常称为补丁）经常会引入新的错误和安全漏洞，通常会带来灾难性的后果。在这个项目中，我们的目标是利用ERC整合者赠款“PASS：安全软件进化的程序分析”的最新研究成果，提供一个自动补丁影响分析，作为持续集成平台的一部分。关键思想是重用在分析系统以前版本时执行的工作，并针对受补丁影响的代码进行分析。分析的最终结果将是一组测试输入，这些测试输入触发补丁引入的新行为，并检测可能引入的任何错误。生成的输入既可以直接添加到测试套件中，也可以扩展以验证补丁是否反映了程序员预期的更改。

Software is in constant evolution. Software changes to implement new features, adapt to new hardware and platforms, fix bugs and security vulnerabilities, or improve non-functional properties, such as performance and energy consumption.Reasoning about all possible new behaviours introduced by a software change is hard. As a result, software changes -- usually called patches -- frequently introduce new bugs and security vulnerabilities, often with disastrous consequences.In this project, we aim to leverage recent research results from the ERC Consolidator Grant "PASS: Program Analysis for Safe and Secure Software Evolution" to provide an automatic patch impact analysis as part of a continuous integration platform. The key ideas are to reuse the work performed while analysing previous versions of the system and to target the analysis toward the code impacted by the patch.The end result of the analysis will be a set of test inputs that trigger the new behaviours introduced by the patch and detect any bugs that may have been introduced. The generated inputs can be either directly added to the test suite or extended to validate that the patch reflects the programmers' intended changes.