EPFL develops collective defense against software bugs

Uncooperative printers aside, bugs that freeze your computer rank among the most annoying PC-related problems.

Developed by the Dependable Systems Lab at EPFL in Switzerland, the latest version of Dimmunix enables programmes to “avoid the future recurrences of bugs [such as computer freezes, or deadlocks as they are known in the trade] without any assistance from users or programmers”.

Labelled “failure immunity”, the technology kicks in the first time a bug occurs by saving a signature, observing how the computer reacts, and recording a trace.

The next time the bug strikes, Dimmunix recognises the trace and “automatically alters the execution so the program continues to run smoothly”.

Professor George Candea, director of Dependable Systems Lab, compares his brainchild to the human immune system.

“Once the body is infected, you develop antibodies. Subsequently, when the immune system encounters the same pathogen again, the body recognizes it and knows how to effectively fight the illness,” he explains.

“It’s not that it prevents infections, it learns what pathogens look like, gets a fingerprint and keeps it for the rest of your life and says to itself: ‘I know what to do now’,” he told Swisster.

For computers “Dimmunix saves a signature of what the programme was doing when the failure occurred and if it occurs again, it steers the execution from what happened in the past,” he said.

For instance your web browser learns how to avoid freezing when bugs associated with plug-ins occur.

This knowledge is then transported through cloud computing technology to take advantage of networks and inoculate entire communities of computers.

“Like with rubella,” he said, returning to the pathogen analogy. “Not everyone has to catch it. We take the experience of others and develop a vaccine.”

“If internet explorer freezes for any reason then the signature can be exported to other users and they will then be immune,” he added.

Candea and his team are constantly working to improve Dumminix, setting up a community where users can report their respective experiences.

“It’s not a cure for everything yet, but we’re taking this paradigm and building it up. In a few years time it will be able to deal with many other types of failure as well,” said Candea, who hopes to attract some open sources software developers to contribute.

Dumminix can be downloaded free. “We are an academic endeavour and our biggest joy is that our work is used by as many people as possible and to touch their lives,” he said.

Candea is said to work for most programs used by private individuals and by companies, especially those written in Java and C/C++.