PROJECTED CMMC LEVEL REQUIREMENT
Level 2 (Self)
TECHNOLOGY AREAS
None
MODERNIZATION PRIORITIES
Advanced Computing and Software
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Integrated Network Systems-of-Systems
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Integrated Sensing and Cyber
KEYWORDS
Cyber; Software Testing; Automation; artificial intelligence; AI; machine learning; ML; large language model; LLM; Debloating; Feature Specification
OBJECTIVE
Develop an automated solution for developing, enhancing, expanding, and augmenting software tests to more safely broaden the employment of proactive cyber techniques such as debloating and post-construction software refactoring. Technology is needed to refine a suite of tests to a level such that it may serve as a practical expression of a software transformation objective to drive other tools as well as validate their output. Technology should leverage multi-modal methods such as ingesting code and documentation as well as be compatible with DevOps processes.
DESCRIPTION
Modern software development practices such as industrialized code reuse and artificial intelligence (AI) assistance enable developers to produce increasingly complex and capable software more quickly and cheaply than ever before. The tools to ensure that all this software is well-tested and that all of the included code is well-tailored to the deployment scenario, however, have lagged by comparison.
Modern applications often include hundreds to thousands of libraries and other dependencies, with often only a small portion of the code in each being ever needed by users in each deployment scenario. The excess code that remains often tends to be less used in general, less well-scrutinized, and full of obscure features that will often be found (sometimes only years later) to contain vulnerabilities. To address this problem, numerous tools have been developed to identify bloat and then modify the software by removing unneeded code [Ref 1]. Configurations, usage logs, and tests that are fed as inputs to code transformation tools to tell them what to cut are referred to as the debloat specifications [Refs 1, 2].
Because the economics of code reuse will continue to drive library and package developers to maximize generality, debloating must happen through a separate process that begins after those components are built into a specific application. The fact that another process will be modifying code separate from the original one that designed, implemented, and tested those components adds risk it is not uncommon to see flawed or incomplete transformations. Evaluation results in [Ref 2] showed that 37% of the debloated binaries they created failed to correctly execute the functionality they were intending to retain.
Many factors can contribute to a transformation yielding a broken application, but one of the biggest is a low-quality debloat specification. Developer-authored tests are often limited and the users of debloating tools rarely can specify in exact detail all the features they actually need for a given deployment scenario. These incomplete specifications can lead tools to be overly aggressive in things like security checks and exception handlers that are critical to application safety and robustness [Ref 3].
To better address the problem of low-quality and incomplete debloat specifications, new technology is needed to more fully incorporate and automate the capturing of desired software behaviors for input to a debloat tool. The technology should be able to take advantage of code analysis as well as analysis of related artifacts such as documentation, build configs, existing tests, and even user input, as long as it can be made practical and easy for a user to answer. Various works have explored methods and techniques for capturing exception handers [Ref 3], balancing reduction with a targeted amount of generality [Ref 4], and leveraging AI to incorporate new tests [Refs 5, 6, 7]. All may inform strategies for automated test generation and augmentation that can lead to higher quality debloat specifications.
PHASE I
Define and develop a concept for automated multi-modal processing of code and other DevOps repository artifacts such as user guides, etc. to generate and augment a suite of tests that can serve as the inputs to proactive cyber security tools, namely debloating. Work toward a design that can develop tests based on unstructured documents and interact with a user to refine the tests. The Phase I Option, if exercised, would develop the initial test augmentation capability to create the full prototype in Phase II.
PHASE II
Develop a prototype containerized test augmentation capability to validate the concept defined in Phase I. Demonstrate the automated multi-modal processing of code, DevOps repository artifacts, and, if necessary, user interview inputs, into developing, enhancing, expanding, and augmenting software tests by the prototype. Ensure that the prototype is deployable in a software factory environment and able to develop many tests to sufficiently, reliably, and robustly enable the debloat of (1) an application using only its existing limited test suite, (2) unstructured program documents like user guides, and (3) real-time user input at the non-expert level by the end of Phase II.
PHASE III DUAL USE APPLICATIONS
Integrate the Phase II developed test augmentation capability with Program of Record systems and their applications. Field containerized solutions that integrate with existing build pipelines.
Potential commercial applications include automated software testing and fuzzing harness generation, a growing need due to the proliferation of AI-generated code.
REFERENCES
Alhanahnah, M.'; Boshmaf Y. and Gehani A. "SoK: Software Debloating Landscape and Future Directions." Workshop on Forming an Ecosystem Around Software Transformation (FEAST), 2024. https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2407.11259
Brown, M. et al. "A Broad Comparative Evaluation of Software Debloating Tools." 33rd USENIX Security Symposium, 2024. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/usenixsecurity24-brown.pdf
Alhanahnah, M. and Jhumka, A. "Software Debloating from Exception-Handler Lenses." Workshop on Forming an Ecosystem Around Software Transformation (FEAST), 2024.pp. 19-24. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689937.3695793
Xin, Q.; Qirun Z. and Orso, A. "Studying and understanding the tradeoffs between generality and reduction in software debloating." 37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, 2022. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3551349.3556970
Lin, B. et al. "Large Language Models-Aided Program Debloating." https://www.arxiv.org/pdf/2503.08969arXiv:2503.08969, 12 March 2025.
Khandaker, S. et al. "AugmenTest: Enhancing Tests with LLM-Driven Oracles." ICST, Naples Italy, 31 March-4 April 2025. arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.17461, 2025 https://conf.researchr.org/details/icst-2025/icst-2025-papers/25/AugmenTest-Enhancing-Tests-with-LLM-driven-Oracles
Dinella, E. et al. "Toga: A neural method for test oracle generation." Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering, 05 July 2022, pp 2130-2141. https://doi.org/10.1145/3510003.3510141
