Effective program debloating via reinforcement learning

Abstract

Prevalent software engineering practices such as code reuse and the “one-size-fits-all” methodology have contributed to significant and widespread increases in the size and complexity of software. The resulting software bloat has led to decreased performance and increased security vulnerabilities. We propose a system called Chisel to enable programmers to effectively customize and debloat programs. Chisel takes as input a program to be debloated and a high-level specification of its desired functionality. The output is a reduced version of the program that is correct with respect to the specification. Chisel significantly improves upon existing program reduction systems by using a novel reinforcement learning-based approach to accelerate the search for the reduced program and scale to large programs. Our evaluation on a suite of 10 widely used UNIX utility programs each comprising 13-90 KLOC of C source code demonstrates that Chisel is able to successfully remove all unwanted functionalities and reduce attack surfaces. Compared to two state-of-the-art program reducers C-Reduce and Perses, which time out on 6 programs and 2 programs respectively in 12 hours, Chisel runs up to 7.1x and 3.7x faster and finishes on all programs. © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.