Cerberus Framework

Cerberus is a research acceleration framework that provides the interface to multiple state-of-the art program analysis tools such as Infer and Pulse, fuzzing tools such as AFL++, Jazzer as well as program repair tools such as F1X, SelfAPR etc. Encapsulating the difficulties to setup the infrastructure for program analysis/repair technology, this platform provides the necessary framework to configure a program for analysis/repair. We have integrated multiple defects benchmarks including but not limited to ManyBugs, VulnLoc and Defects4J. This platform also provides the necessary means for researchers to run experiments more efficiently and effectively, with more user-friendly features such as push notifications, and summary extraction.

Highlights

• Empowered the First International Program Repair Competition to evaluate 10 repair tools in 6 tracks covering mulitple programming languages (Java, C and Python), totalling upto 475 repair tasks.
• Benchmarking platform used to run the Fuzzing Hackathon at the Fuzzing and Software Security Summer School, continuous evaluation for 3 days evaluating upto 138 different fuzzing tools.
• Automated student assignment grading for Masters Course CS5219 taught at NUS.

Features

• Execution of analysis/repair tools on benchmarks of bugs
• Configuration of the environment to execute analysis/repair tools properly on the bugs
• Concurrent execution of multiple analysis/repair tools
• Artifacts are extracted and stored for each experiment
• Push notification once experiments are completed

Installation Procedure

When cloning the repository ensure that the submodules containing the benchmarks are initialized. There are two ways to do this:

• git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/nus-apr/cerberus to init when cloning the project
• or running git submodule init && git submodule update to initialize them post cloning (update can take in a specific path if one wants to initialize only one benchmark)

To ensure that Cerberus has all dependencies one has to run pip install -r requirements.txt before trying to use Cerberus.

Using Cerberus

Following is a simple snippet for the command to run an experiment from a selected benchmark.

source activate
cerberus -task [analyze/repair] --bug-index=ID  --benchmark=[manybugs/vulnloc] --tool=[cpr/angelix/prophet/f1x]

Supported Tools and Benchmark

Full list of supported tools and benchmarks

Bugs

Cerberus should be considered alpha-quality software. Bugs can be reported here:

https://github.com/nus-apr/cerberus/issues

Documentation

• Getting Started
• Example Usage
• Manual
• Extending
• Project Architecture
• Notifications
• Configuration file

Citation

If you use Cerberus in your research work, we would highly appreciate it if you cited the following paper:

@inproceedings{cerberus,
author = {Shariffdeen, Ridwan and Mirchev, Martin and Noller, Yannic and Roychoudhury, Abhik},
title = {Cerberus: A Program Repair Framework},
year = {2023},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 45th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings},
location = {Melbourne, Australia},
series = {ICSE '23},
pages={73-77},
doi={10.1109/ICSE-Companion58688.2023.00028}
}