SemFix and Beyond: Semantic Techniques for Program Repair

Automated program repair is of great promise for future programming environments. It is also of obvious importance for patching vulnerabilities in software, or for building self-healing systems for critical infra-structure. Traditional program repair techniques tend to lift the fix from elsewhere in the program via syntax based approaches. In this talk, I will mention how the search problems in program repair can be solved by semantic analysis techniques. Here semantic analysis methods are not only used to guide the search, but also for extracting formal specifications from tests. I will conclude with positioning of the syntax based and semantic based methods for vulnerability patching, future generation programming, and self-healing systems.