Specializing Software Libraries for Security and Performance

The Clade project investigates the automatic specialization of software libraries for a specific application.

Library specialization improves the security of the application, by reducing its attack surface through code removal, as well as its performance, by reducing the resources necessary to distribute and operate the application.

The specialization of one library with respect to a set of different applications  leads to the generation of many library variants, which contributes to increasing software diversity.Clade focuses on dynamic program analysis to determine what parts of libraries are necessary for a specific application.

The project´s methodology is based on experimental computer science. We select a representative set of existing libraries and applications that reuse them.

Based on this curated set of software subjects, we measure the impact of library specialization on security and performance. Clade is a 4-year project.

It is expected to result in the training of expert graduate students, original and sound scientific contributions, as well as open source software tools.