online talk "Localization of Unreproducible Builds"

[Martin Monperrus]

Dear all,

You are warmly invited to attend the online talk:

Localization of Unreproducible Builds
Tuesday 24 November 2020, 13h CET
https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/62157301631​

Best regards,

--Martin Monperrus, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

# Title
Localization of Unreproducible Builds

# Speaker
Jifeng Xuan, School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, China

# Abstract
Reproducibility is the ability of recreating identical binaries under 
pre-defined build environments. Due to the need of quality assurance and 
the benefit of better detecting attacks against build environments, the 
practice of reproducible builds has gained popularity in many 
open-source software repositories such as Debian and Bitcoin. However, 
identifying the unreproducible issues remains a labour intensive and 
time-consuming challenge. In this talk, we introduce a technique called 
RepLoc of localizing the problematic files for unreproducible builds. 
RepLoc features a query augmentation component that utilizes the 
information extracted from the build logs, and a heuristic rule-based 
filtering component that narrows the search scope. By integrating the 
two components with a weighted file ranking module, RepLoc is able to 
automatically produce a ranked list of files that are helpful in 
locating the problematic files for the unreproducible builds. We have 
implemented a prototype and conducted extensive experiments over 671 
real-world unreproducible Debian packages in four different categories. 
After introducing the localization of unreproducible builds, the talk 
presents several of our efforts that address the reproduction of 
software behaviors.

# Bio
Jifeng Xuan is a professor at the School of Computer Science, Wuhan 
University, China. He received the B.S. degree and the Ph.D. degree from 
Dalian University of Technology, China. He was previously a postdoctoral 
researcher at the INRIA Lille-Nord Europe, France. He has published over 
60 papers in software engineering. His work won the ACM SIGSOFT 
Distinguished Paper Award and the ESI Highly-cited Papers. He was 
elected by the Young Elite Scientists Sponsorship Program by China 
Association for Science and Technology (CAST); he has won the 
Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation of the China Computer Federation 
(CCF). He is a PC member of several conferences, including ASE, ISSTA, 
SANER. He is a reviewer of several journals, including TSE, TOSEM, TKDE, 
TEVC, TMIS, TSC, TRE. His research interests include software testing 
and debugging, software data analysis, and search-based software 
engineering. Please visit his research group, CSTAR, 
http://cstar.whu.edu.cn/