As it stands whenever a bug for a piece of software is discovered, and depending on how serious and responsive the developers are, an update could be pushed out within a day, a couple of days, weeks, or sometimes even months like we’ve seen in the past, a good example being the latest OS X 10.10.4 release which finally addressed a WiFi issue plaguing OS X users for months on end.That being said it seems that the folks at MIT have come up with an interesting way of solving this problem of waiting on updates. They have created a system called CodePhage which is basically a system that will be able to update software automatically and patch up any bugs it finds and it will do this by borrowing features from other applications.
According to MIT News, CodePhage will not need to rely on having access to the app’s source code. “Instead, it analyzes the applications’ execution and characterizes the types of security checks they perform. As a consequence, it can import checks from applications written in programming languages other than the one in which the program it’s repairing was written.”
Of course there will need to be checks to ensure that it’s all been fixed which they add, “Once it’s imported code into a vulnerable application, CodePhage can provide a further layer of analysis that guarantees that the bug has been repaired.” It is an intriguing idea and this could that users won’t have to wait around on developers to issue a fix, and technically it could mean that softwares could be maintained forever, at least as far as bug fixes are concerned.
[Image credit – Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT]