Microsoft previews Project Springfield, a cloud-based bug detector

Here's the research paper, Automated Whitebox Fuzz Testing by Patrice Godefroid, Michael Levin, and David Molnar:

"Our approach records an actual run of the program under test on a well-formed input, symbolically evaluates the recorded trace, and gathers constraints on inputs capturing how the program uses these. The collected constraints are then negated one by one and solved with a constraint solver, producing new inputs that exercise different control paths in the program. This process is repeated with the help of a code-coverage maximizing heuristic designed to find defects as fast as possible."

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

I usually scroll down for appealing infographics before I start reading the post. But all we got here is people posing for their new Linkedin profile pic

>> With widely used software such as an operating system or productivity suite, deploying those patches can cost as much as $1 million, the researchers say.

That is part of why so many people dislike Microsoft's attitude. Who cares that it costs 1m to deploy a patch. Corporate customers are going to be spending far more than a million installing that patch. Just think about how many customers are out there who have to test and apply this patch. Fixing a vulnerability prior to release is worth billions of dollars to millions of customers. That should be the math, not how much MS must spend every other Tuesday.