HACKAR: Helpful Advice for Code Knowledge and Attack Resilience

Program Summary

HACKAR is a new approach to proactive analysis, detection, and diagnosis of vulnerabilities in functions and modules at development time. HACKAR helps programmers by providing advice and coding knowledge for addressing potential vulnerabilities in their code, so that programmers can be aware of these threats and fix them before the code is deployed. Like modern static-analysis tools, HACKAR automatically identifies problems in software during development. However, HACKAR accomplishes this by dynamically testing code fragments using fuzzed inputs to find and localize potential vulnerabilities. We have developed new algorithms for learning workflows from functional analysis of the users' code and new algorithms that can produce causal explanations and human-understandable code-transformation advice about ways to fix the identified vulnerabilities.

A fact sheet is avaialble for download: [pdf]