MIT tests 'software transplants' to fix buggy code

Like visiting a junk yard to find cheap parts for an aging vehicle, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have come up with a way to fix buggy software by inserting working code from another program.

Using a system they call CodePhage, the researchers were able to fix flaws in seven common open-source programs by using, in each case, functionality taken from between two and four “donor” programs.

Fixing such errors can help make code more secure, since malicious hackers often exploit flaws to gain entry to a system. CodePhage can recognize and fix common programming errors such as out of bounds access, integer overflows, and divide-by-zero errors.

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