Privacy in Software Error Reporting

What is it about?

This paper presents REAP, a new fault replication method, which allows for enhancing privacy protection while still providing software developers with the ‘steps-to-reproduce” errors. REAP uses symbolic execution and randomized search heuristics to identify alternative execution paths leading to an observed error.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Nowadays, most operating systems include error reporting tools that enable users to report software problems to developers. However, reporting errors raises privacy concerns, which may either disclose private information or prevent the user from reporting software problems. One should not have to choose between privacy protection and software reliability, hence this is a critical trade-off that is important to address.