Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
From Communications of the ACM
Enhancing Symbolic Execution with Veritesting
In this article, we present a new technique for generating formulas called veritesting that alternates between static symbolic execution (SSE) and dynamic symbolic...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: A Breakthrough in Software Obfuscation
In "Hiding Secrets in Software," Garg et al. construct a "one-way compiler" of the type envisioned by Diffie and Hellman.
From Communications of the ACM
Hiding Secrets in Software: A Cryptographic Approach to Program Obfuscation
Can we hide secrets in software? Can we make programs unintelligible while preserving their functionality? Why would we even want to do this? In this article, we...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Software Is Natural
"On the Naturalness of Software" by Hindle et al. takes an entirely new approach to providing tools to help build software.
From Communications of the ACM
On the Naturalness of Software
We begin with the conjecture that most software is natural, with all the attendant constraints and limitations — and thus, like natural language, it is also likely...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: The State (and Security) of the Bitcoin Economy
"A Fistful of Bitcoins" examines, in the context of Bitcoin, what we could learn by studying the patterns encoded in a complete record of every single financial...
From Communications of the ACM
A Fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing Payments Among Men with No Names
Bitcoin has the unintuitive property that while the ownership of money is implicitly anonymous, its flow is globally visible. In this paper we explore this unique...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Fairness and the Coin Flip
"Secure Multiparty Computations on Bitcoin" introduces an exciting new idea for how to provide fairness: leverage Bitcoin’s existing infrastructure for distributed...
From Communications of the ACM
Secure Multiparty Computations on Bitcoin
In this work, we propose to use Bitcoin to design fully decentralized protocols that are secure even if no trusted third party is available.
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Taming the Name Game
In "Learning to Name Objects," the authors offer a method to determine a basic-level category name for an object in an image.
From Communications of the ACM
Learning to Name Objects
This paper looks at the problem of predicting category labels that mimic how human observers would name objects.
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Stacking Up Undefined Behaviors
In "A Differential Approach to Undefined Behavior Detection," Wang et al. hypothesize that any time a compiler is able to delete code by using reasoning based on...
From Communications of the ACM
A Differential Approach to Undefined Behavior Detection
This paper studies undefined behavior arising in systems programming languages such as C/C++. We introduce a new static checker called STACK that precisely identifies...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Program Synthesis Using Stochastic Techniques
The authors of "Stochastic Program Optimization" have developed a stochastic search technique and applied it to program optimization.
From Communications of the ACM
Stochastic Program Optimization
By encoding constraints of transformation correctness as terms in a cost function, and using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler to explore the space of all possible...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Catching Lies (and Mistakes) in Offloaded Computation
The system described in "Pinocchio: Nearly Practical Verifiable Computation" refines an important theoretical advance by Gennaro et al. Together, these two works represent...
From Communications of the ACM
Pinocchio: Nearly Practical Verifiable Computation
We introduce Pinocchio, a built system for efficiently verifying general computations while relying only on cryptographic assumptions.
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Enlisting the Power of the Crowd
An important contribution of "Answering Enumeration Queries with the Crowd" is the observation that by using the crowd for the collection of new data, we are departing...
From Communications of the ACM
Answering Enumeration Queries with the Crowd
Hybrid human/computer database systems promise to greatly expand the usefulness of query processing by incorporating the crowd. Such systems raise many implementation...
From Communications of the ACM