Analysis of Program Patches Nature and Searching for Unpatched Code Fragments

Software developers often copy and paste code within a project. Due to the possible existence of defects in the initial code fragment, this can lead to defects propagation across the project. Software changes in new version (patches) usually contain bug fixes, which can be used for detecting similar defects in a project. The purpose of this work is to develop method for analyzing the nature of patches between versions of executables and finding unpatched code fragments. At first, two versions of executables are compared for finding common and changed parts of code. Then, the method determines patches that can possibly be fixes of bugs. The final step is detection of unpatched code fragments. It is based on finding all clones of the buggy code fragments found in previous step which are not patched in the new version of the program. These fragments possibly contain defects. Developed tool allows to analyze programs of several architectures (x86, x86-64, arm, mips, powerpc). The experimental results show that the average percentage of true positive rate on the CoreBench test suite is 73%.