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After an exploit is made known to the authors of the affected software, the vulnerability is often fixed through a patch and the exploit becomes unusable. That is the reason why some black hat hackers as well as military or intelligence agencies' hackers do not publish their exploits but keep them private.
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Exploits unknown to everyone except the people that found and developed them are referred to as zero day or “0day” exploits.
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Exploits are used by hackers to bypass security controls and manipulate system vulnerabilities. Researchers have estimated that this costs over $450 billion every year from the global economy. In response, organizations are using cyber threat intelligence to protect their vulnerabilities.
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Exploitations are commonly categorized and named by the type of vulnerability they exploit , whether they are local/remote and the result of running the exploit . One scheme that offers zero day exploits is exploit as a service.
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A zero-click attack is an exploit that requires no user interaction to operate – that is to say, no key-presses or mouse clicks. FORCEDENTRY, discovered in 2021, is an example of a zero-click attack.
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These exploits are commonly the most sought after exploits because the target typically has no way of knowing they have been compromised at the time of exploitation.
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In 2022, NSO Group was reportedly selling zero-click exploits to governments for breaking into individuals' phones.
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Pivoting is a method used by hackers and penetration testers to expand the attack surface of a target organization. A compromised system to attack other systems on the same network that are not directly reachable from the Internet due to restrictions such as firewall. There tend to be more machines reachable from inside a network as compared to Internet facing hosts. For example, if an attacker compromises a web server on a corporate network, the attacker can then use the compromised web server to attack any reachable system on the network. These types of attacks are often called multi-layered attacks. Pivoting is also known as island hopping.
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Pivoting can further be distinguished into proxy pivoting and VPN pivoting:
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Typically, the proxy or VPN applications enabling pivoting are executed on the target computer as the payload of an exploit.
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Pivoting is usually done by infiltrating a part of a network infrastructure and using a scanner to find other devices connected to attack them. By attacking a vulnerable piece of networking, an attacker could infect most or all of a network and gain complete control.
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In computing, a crash, or system crash, occurs when a computer program such as a software application or an operating system stops functioning properly and exits. On some operating systems or individual applications, a crash reporting service will report the crash and any details relating to it , usually to the developer of the application. If the program is a critical part of the operating system, the entire system may crash or hang, often resulting in a kernel panic or fatal system error.
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Most crashes are the result of a software bug. Typical causes include accessing invalid memory addresses, incorrect address values in the program counter, buffer overflow, overwriting a portion of the affected program code due to an earlier bug, executing invalid machine instructions , or triggering an unhandled exception. The original software bug that started this chain of events is typically considered to be the cause of the crash, which is discovered through the process of debugging. The original bug can be far removed from the code that actually triggered the crash.
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In early personal computers, attempting to write data to hardware addresses outside the system's main memory could cause hardware damage. Some crashes are exploitable and let a malicious program or hacker execute arbitrary code, allowing the replication of viruses or the acquisition of data which would normally be inaccessible.
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An application typically crashes when it performs an operation that is not allowed by the operating system. The operating system then triggers an exception or signal in the application. Unix applications traditionally responded to the signal by dumping core. Most Windows and Unix GUI applications respond by displaying a dialogue box with the option to attach a debugger if one is installed. Some applications attempt to recover from the error and continue running instead of exiting.
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An application can also contain code to crash after detecting a severe error.
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Typical errors that result in application crashes include:
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A "crash to desktop" is said to occur when a program unexpectedly quits, abruptly taking the user back to the desktop. Usually, the term is applied only to crashes where no error is displayed, hence all the user sees as a result of the crash is the desktop. Many times there is no apparent action that causes a crash to desktop. During normal function, the program may freeze for a shorter period of time, and then close by itself. Also during normal function, the program may become a black screen and repeatedly play the last few seconds of sound that was being played before it crashes to desktop. Other times it may appear to be triggered by a certain action, such as loading an area.
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Crash to desktop bugs are considered particularly problematic for users. Since they frequently display no error message, it can be very difficult to track down the source of the problem, especially if the times they occur and the actions taking place right before the crash do not appear to have any pattern or common ground. One way to track down the source of the problem for games is to run them in windowed-mode. Windows Vista has a feature that can help track down the cause of a CTD problem when it occurs on any program. Windows XP included a similar feature as well.
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Some computer programs, such as StepMania and BBC's Bamzooki, also crash to desktop if in full-screen, but display the error in a separate window when the user has returned to the desktop.
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The software running the web server behind a website may crash, rendering it inaccessible entirely or providing only an error message instead of normal content.
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For example: if a site is using an SQL database for a script and that SQL database server crashes, then PHP will display a connection error.
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An operating system crash commonly occurs when a hardware exception occurs that cannot be handled. Operating system crashes can also occur when internal sanity-checking logic within the operating system detects that the operating system has lost its internal self-consistency.
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Modern multi-tasking operating systems, such as Linux, and macOS, usually remain unharmed when an application program crashes.
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Some operating systems, e.g., z/OS, have facilities for Reliability, availability and serviceability and the OS can recover from the crash of a critical component, whether due to hardware failure, e.g., uncorrectable ECC error, or to software failure, e.g., a reference to an unassigned page.
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An Abnormal end or ABEND is an abnormal termination of software, or a program crash. Errors or crashes on the Novell NetWare network operating system are usually called ABENDs. Communities of NetWare administrators sprung up around the Internet, such as abend.org.
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This usage derives from the ABEND macro on IBM OS/360, ..., z/OS operating systems. Usually capitalized, but may appear as "abend". Some common ABEND codes are System ABEND 0C7 and System ABEND 0CB . Abends can be "soft" or "hard" .The term is jocularly claimed to be derived from the German word "abend" meaning "evening".
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Depending on the application, the crash may contain the user's sensitive and private information. Moreover, many software bugs which cause crashes are also exploitable for arbitrary code execution and other types of privilege escalation. For example, a stack buffer overflow can overwrite the return address of a subroutine with an invalid value, which will cause, e.g., a segmentation fault, when the subroutine returns. However, if an exploit overwrites the return address with a valid value, the code in that address will be executed.
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When crashes are collected in the field using a crash reporter, the next step for developers is to be able to reproduce them locally. For this, several techniques exist:
STAR uses symbolic execution,
EvoCrash performs evolutionary search.
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Hangs have varied causes and symptoms, including software or hardware defects, such as an infinite loop or long-running uninterruptible computation, resource exhaustion , under-performing hardware , external events such as a slow computer network, misconfiguration, and compatibility problems. The fundamental reason is typically resource exhaustion: resources necessary for some part of the system to run are not available, due to being in use by other processes or simply insufficient. Often the cause is an interaction of multiple factors, making "hang" a loose umbrella term rather than a technical one.
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A hang may be temporary if caused by a condition that resolves itself, such as slow hardware, or it may be permanent and require manual intervention, as in the case of a hardware or software logic error. Many modern operating systems provide the user with a means to forcibly terminate a hung program without rebooting or logging out; some operating systems, such as those designed for mobile devices, may even do this automatically. In more severe hangs affecting the whole system, the only solution might be to reboot the machine, usually by power cycling with an off/on or reset button.
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A hang differs from a crash, in which the failure is immediate and unrelated to the responsiveness of inputs.
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In a multitasking operating system, it is possible for an individual process or thread to get stuck, such as blocking on a resource or getting into an infinite loop, though the effect on the overall system varies significantly. In a cooperative multitasking system, any thread that gets stuck without yielding will hang the system, as it will wedge itself as the running thread and prevent other threads from running.
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By contrast, modern operating systems primarily use pre-emptive multitasking, such as Windows 2000 and its successors, as well as Linux and Apple Inc.'s macOS. In these cases, a single thread getting stuck will not necessarily hang the system, as the operating system will preempt it when its time slice expires, allowing another thread to run. If a thread does hang, the scheduler may switch to another group of interdependent tasks so that all processes will not hang. However, a stuck thread will still consume resources: at least an entry in scheduling, and if it is running , it will consume processor cycles and power when it is scheduled, slowing the system though it does not hang it.
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However, even with preemptive multitasking, a system can hang, and a misbehaved or malicious task can hang the system, primarily by monopolizing some other resource, such as IO or memory, even though processor time cannot be monopolized. For example, a process that blocks the file system will often hang the system.
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Moving around a window on top of a hanging program during a hang may cause a window trail from redrawing.
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Hardware can cause a computer to hang, either because it is intermittent or because it is mismatched with other hardware in the computer . Hardware can also become defective over time due to dirt or heat damage.
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A hang can also occur due to the fact that the programmer has incorrect termination conditions for a loop, or, in a co-operative multitasking operating system, forgetting to yield to other tasks. Said differently, many software-related hangs are caused by threads waiting for an event to occur which will never occur. This is also known as an infinite loop.
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Another cause of hangs is a race condition in communication between processes. One process may send a signal to a second process then stop execution until it receives a response. If the second process is busy the signal will be forced to wait until the process can get to it. However, if the second process was busy sending a signal to the first process then both processes would wait forever for the other to respond to signals and never see the other’s signal . If the processes are uninterruptible they will hang and have to be shut down. If at least one of the processes is a critical kernel process the whole system may hang and have to be restarted.
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A computer may seem to hang when in fact it is simply processing very slowly. This can be caused by too many programs running at once, not enough memory , or memory fragmentation, slow hardware access , slow system APIs, etc. It can also be caused by hidden programs which were installed surreptitiously, such as spyware.
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In many cases programs may appear to be hung, but are making slow progress, and waiting a few minutes will allow the task to complete.
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Modern operating systems provide a mechanism for terminating hung processes, for instance, with the Unix kill command, or through a graphical means such as the Task Manager's "end task" button in Windows . Older systems, such as those running MS-DOS, early versions of Windows, or Classic Mac OS often needed to be completely restarted in the event of a hang.
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On embedded devices where human interaction is limited, a watchdog timer can reboot the computer in the event of a hang.
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A software bug is an error, flaw or fault in the design, development, or operation of computer software that causes it to produce an incorrect or unexpected result, or to behave in unintended ways. The process of finding and correcting bugs is termed "debugging" and often uses formal techniques or tools to pinpoint bugs. Since the 1950s, some computer systems have been designed to detect or auto-correct various software errors during operations.
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Bugs in software can arise from mistakes and errors made in interpreting and extracting users' requirements, planning a program's design, writing its source code, and from interaction with humans, hardware and programs, such as operating systems or libraries. A program with many, or serious, bugs is often described as buggy. Bugs can trigger errors that may have ripple effects. The effects of bugs may be subtle, such as unintended text formatting, through to more obvious effects such as causing a program to crash, freezing the computer, or causing damage to hardware. Other bugs qualify as security bugs and might, for example, enable a malicious user to bypass access controls in order to obtain unauthorized privileges.
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Some software bugs have been linked to disasters. Bugs in code that controlled the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine were directly responsible for patient deaths in the 1980s. In 1996, the European Space Agency's US$1 billion prototype Ariane 5 rocket was destroyed less than a minute after launch due to a bug in the on-board guidance computer program. In 1994, an RAF Chinook helicopter crashed, killing 29; this was initially blamed on pilot error, but was later thought to have been caused by a software bug in the engine-control computer. Buggy software caused the early 21st century British Post Office scandal, the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history.
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In 2002, a study commissioned by the US Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded that "software bugs, or errors, are so prevalent and so detrimental that they cost the US economy an estimated $59 billion annually, or about 0.6 percent of the gross domestic product".
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The Middle English word bugge is the basis for the terms "bugbear" and "bugaboo" as terms used for a monster.
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The term "bug" to describe defects has been a part of engineering jargon since the 1870s and predates electronics and computers; it may have originally been used in hardware engineering to describe mechanical malfunctions. For instance, Thomas Edison wrote in a letter to an associate in 1878:
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Baffle Ball, the first mechanical pinball game, was advertised as being "free of bugs" in 1931. Problems with military gear during World War II were referred to as bugs . In a book published in 1942, Louise Dickinson Rich, speaking of a powered ice cutting machine, said, "Ice sawing was suspended until the creator could be brought in to take the bugs out of his darling."
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Isaac Asimov used the term "bug" to relate to issues with a robot in his short story "Catch That Rabbit", published in 1944.
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The term "bug" was used in an account by computer pioneer Grace Hopper, who publicized the cause of a malfunction in an early electromechanical computer. A typical version of the story is:
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Hopper was not present when the bug was found, but it became one of her favorite stories. The date in the log book was September 9, 1947. The operators who found it, including William "Bill" Burke, later of the Naval Weapons Laboratory, Dahlgren, Virginia, were familiar with the engineering term and amusedly kept the insect with the notation "First actual case of bug being found." This log book, complete with attached moth, is part of the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
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The related term "debug" also appears to predate its usage in computing: the Oxford English Dictionary's etymology of the word contains an attestation from 1945, in the context of aircraft engines.
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The concept that software might contain errors dates back to Ada Lovelace's 1843 notes on the analytical engine, in which she speaks of the possibility of program "cards" for Charles Babbage's analytical engine being erroneous:
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While the use of the term "bug" to describe software errors is common, many have suggested that it should be abandoned. One argument is that the word "bug" is divorced from a sense that a human being caused the problem, and instead implies that the defect arose on its own, leading to a push to abandon the term "bug" in favor of terms such as "defect", with limited success.
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The term "bug" may also be used to cover up an intentional design decision. In 2011, after receiving scrutiny from US Senator Al Franken for recording and storing users' locations in unencrypted files, Apple called the behavior a bug. However, Justin Brookman of the Center for Democracy and Technology directly challenged that portrayal, stating "I'm glad that they are fixing what they call bugs, but I take exception with their strong denial that they track users."
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In software engineering, mistake metamorphism refers to the evolution of a defect in the final stage of software deployment. Transformation of a "mistake" committed by an analyst in the early stages of the software development lifecycle, which leads to a "defect" in the final stage of the cycle has been called 'mistake metamorphism'.
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Different stages of a "mistake" in the entire cycle may be described as "mistakes", "anomalies", "faults", "failures", "errors", "exceptions", "crashes", "glitches", "bugs", "defects", "incidents", or "side effects".
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The software industry has put much effort into reducing bug counts. These include:
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Bugs usually appear when the programmer makes a logic error. Various innovations in programming style and defensive programming are designed to make these bugs less likely, or easier to spot. Some typos, especially of symbols or operators, allow the program to operate incorrectly, while others such as a missing symbol or misspelled name may prevent the program from operating. Compiled languages can reveal some typos when the source code is compiled.
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Several schemes assist managing programmer activity so that fewer bugs are produced. Software engineering applies many techniques to prevent defects. For example, formal program specifications state the exact behavior of programs so that design bugs may be eliminated. Formal specifications are impractical for anything but the shortest programs, because of problems of combinatorial explosion and indeterminacy.
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Unit testing involves writing a test for every function that a program is to perform.
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In test-driven development unit tests are written before the code and the code is not considered complete until all tests complete successfully.
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Agile software development involves frequent software releases with relatively small changes. Defects are revealed by user feedback.
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Open source development allows anyone to examine source code. A school of thought popularized by Eric S. Raymond as Linus's law says that popular open-source software has more chance of having few or no bugs than other software, because "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". This assertion has been disputed, however: computer security specialist Elias Levy wrote that "it is easy to hide vulnerabilities in complex, little understood and undocumented source code," because, "even if people are reviewing the code, that doesn't mean they're qualified to do so." An example of an open-source software bug was the 2008 OpenSSL vulnerability in Debian.
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Programming languages include features to help prevent bugs, such as static type systems, restricted namespaces and modular programming. For example, when a programmer writes LET REAL_VALUE PI = "THREE AND A BIT", although this may be syntactically correct, the code fails a type check. Compiled languages catch this without having to run the program. Interpreted languages catch such errors at runtime. Some languages deliberately exclude features that easily lead to bugs, at the expense of slower performance: the general principle being that, it is almost always better to write simpler, slower code than inscrutable code that runs slightly faster, especially considering that maintenance cost is substantial. For example, the Java programming language does not support pointer arithmetic; implementations of some languages such as Pascal and scripting languages often have runtime bounds checking of arrays, at least in a debugging build.
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Tools for code analysis help developers by inspecting the program text beyond the compiler's capabilities to spot potential problems. Although in general the problem of finding all programming errors given a specification is not solvable , these tools exploit the fact that human programmers tend to make certain kinds of simple mistakes often when writing software.
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Tools to monitor the performance of the software as it is running, either specifically to find problems such as bottlenecks or to give assurance as to correct working, may be embedded in the code explicitly , or provided as tools. It is often a surprise to find where most of the time is taken by a piece of code, and this removal of assumptions might cause the code to be rewritten.
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Software testers are people whose primary task is to find bugs, or write code to support testing. On some efforts, more resources may be spent on testing than in developing the program.
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Measurements during testing can provide an estimate of the number of likely bugs remaining; this becomes more reliable the longer a product is tested and developed.
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Finding and fixing bugs, or debugging, is a major part of computer programming. Maurice Wilkes, an early computing pioneer, described his realization in the late 1940s that much of the rest of his life would be spent finding mistakes in his programs.
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Usually, the most difficult part of debugging is finding the bug. Once it is found, correcting it is usually relatively easy. Programs known as debuggers help programmers locate bugs by executing code line by line, watching variable values, and other features to observe program behavior. Without a debugger, code may be added so that messages or values may be written to a console or to a window or log file to trace program execution or show values.
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However, even with the aid of a debugger, locating bugs is something of an art. It is not uncommon for a bug in one section of a program to cause failures in a completely different section, thus making it especially difficult to track , in an apparently unrelated part of the system.
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Sometimes, a bug is not an isolated flaw, but represents an error of thinking or planning on the part of the programmer. Such logic errors require a section of the program to be overhauled or rewritten. As a part of code review, stepping through the code and imagining or transcribing the execution process may often find errors without ever reproducing the bug as such.
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More typically, the first step in locating a bug is to reproduce it reliably. Once the bug is reproducible, the programmer may use a debugger or other tool while reproducing the error to find the point at which the program went astray.
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Some bugs are revealed by inputs that may be difficult for the programmer to re-create. One cause of the Therac-25 radiation machine deaths was a bug that occurred only when the machine operator very rapidly entered a treatment plan; it took days of practice to become able to do this, so the bug did not manifest in testing or when the manufacturer attempted to duplicate it. Other bugs may stop occurring whenever the setup is augmented to help find the bug, such as running the program with a debugger; these are called heisenbugs .
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Since the 1990s, particularly following the Ariane 5 Flight 501 disaster, interest in automated aids to debugging rose, such as static code analysis by abstract interpretation.
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Some classes of bugs have nothing to do with the code. Faulty documentation or hardware may lead to problems in system use, even though the code matches the documentation. In some cases, changes to the code eliminate the problem even though the code then no longer matches the documentation. Embedded systems frequently work around hardware bugs, since to make a new version of a ROM is much cheaper than remanufacturing the hardware, especially if they are commodity items.
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To facilitate reproducible research on testing and debugging, researchers use curated benchmarks of bugs:
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Bug management includes the process of documenting, categorizing, assigning, reproducing, correcting and releasing the corrected code. Proposed changes to software – bugs as well as enhancement requests and even entire releases – are commonly tracked and managed using bug tracking systems or issue tracking systems. The items added may be called defects, tickets, issues, or, following the agile development paradigm, stories and epics. Categories may be objective, subjective or a combination, such as version number, area of the software, severity and priority, as well as what type of issue it is, such as a feature request or a bug.
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A bug triage reviews bugs and decides whether and when to fix them. The decision is based on the bug's priority, and factors such as development schedules. The triage is not meant to investigate the cause of bugs, but rather the cost of fixing them. The triage happens regularly, and goes through bugs opened or reopened since the previous meeting. The attendees of the triage process typically are the project manager, development manager, test manager, build manager, and technical experts.
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Severity is the intensity of the impact the bug has on system operation. This impact may be data loss, financial, loss of goodwill and wasted effort. Severity levels are not standardized. Impacts differ across industry. A crash in a video game has a totally different impact than a crash in a web browser, or real time monitoring system. For example, bug severity levels might be "crash or hang", "no workaround" , "has workaround" , "visual defect" , or "documentation error". Some software publishers use more qualified severities such as "critical", "high", "low", "blocker" or "trivial". The severity of a bug may be a separate category to its priority for fixing, and the two may be quantified and managed separately.
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Priority controls where a bug falls on the list of planned changes. The priority is decided by each software producer. Priorities may be numerical, such as 1 through 5, or named, such as "critical", "high", "low", or "deferred". These rating scales may be similar or even identical to severity ratings, but are evaluated as a combination of the bug's severity with its estimated effort to fix; a bug with low severity but easy to fix may get a higher priority than a bug with moderate severity that requires excessive effort to fix. Priority ratings may be aligned with product releases, such as "critical" priority indicating all the bugs that must be fixed before the next software release.
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A bug severe enough to delay or halt the release of the product is called a "show stopper" or "showstopper bug". It is named so because it "stops the show" – causes unacceptable product failure.
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It is common practice to release software with known, low-priority bugs. Bugs of sufficiently high priority may warrant a special release of part of the code containing only modules with those fixes. These are known as patches. Most releases include a mixture of behavior changes and multiple bug fixes. Releases that emphasize bug fixes are known as maintenance releases, to differentiate it from major releases that emphasize feature additions or changes.
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Reasons that a software publisher opts not to patch or even fix a particular bug include:
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In software development, a mistake or error may be introduced at any stage. Bugs arise from oversight or misunderstanding by a software team during specification, design, coding, configuration, data entry or documentation. For example, a relatively simple program to alphabetize a list of words, the design might fail to consider what should happen when a word contains a hyphen. Or when converting an abstract design into code, the coder might inadvertently create an off-by-one error which can be a "<" where "<=" was intended, and fail to sort the last word in a list.
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Another category of bug is called a race condition that may occur when programs have multiple components executing at the same time. If the components interact in a different order than the developer intended, they could interfere with each other and stop the program from completing its tasks. These bugs may be difficult to detect or anticipate, since they may not occur during every execution of a program.
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Conceptual errors are a developer's misunderstanding of what the software must do. The resulting software may perform according to the developer's understanding, but not what is really needed. Other types:
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In operations on numerical values, problems can arise that result in unexpected output, slowing of a process, or crashing. These can be from a lack of awareness of the qualities of the data storage such as a loss of precision due to rounding, numerically unstable algorithms, arithmetic overflow and underflow, or from lack of awareness of how calculations are handled by different software coding languages such as division by zero which in some languages may throw an exception, and in others may return a special value such as NaN or infinity.
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Control flow bugs are those found in processes with valid logic, but that lead to unintended results, such as infinite loops and infinite recursion, incorrect comparisons for conditional statements such as using the incorrect comparison operator, and off-by-one errors .
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The amount and type of damage a software bug may cause naturally affects decision-making, processes and policy regarding software quality. In applications such as human spaceflight, aviation, nuclear power, health care, public transport or automotive safety, since software flaws have the potential to cause human injury or even death, such software will have far more scrutiny and quality control than, for example, an online shopping website. In applications such as banking, where software flaws have the potential to cause serious financial damage to a bank or its customers, quality control is also more important than, say, a photo editing application.
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Other than the damage caused by bugs, some of their cost is due to the effort invested in fixing them. In 1978, Lientz et al. showed that the median of projects invest 17 percent of the development effort in bug fixing. In 2020, research on GitHub repositories showed the median is 20%.
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In 1994, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center managed to reduce their average number of errors from 4.5 per 1000 lines of code down to 1 per 1000 SLOC.
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Another study in 1990 reported that exceptionally good software development processes can achieve deployment failure rates as low as 0.1 per 1000 SLOC. This figure is iterated in literature such as Code Complete by Steve McConnell, and the NASA study on Flight Software Complexity. Some projects even attained zero defects: the firmware in the IBM Wheelwriter typewriter which consists of 63,000 SLOC, and the Space Shuttle software with 500,000 SLOC.
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A number of software bugs have become well-known, usually due to their severity: examples include various space and military aircraft crashes. Possibly the most famous bug is the Year 2000 problem or Y2K bug, which caused many programs written long before the transition from 19xx to 20xx dates to malfunction. For instance, the date "25 December 04," referring to 2004, may have been incorrectly treated as 1904, or the year "2000" may have been incorrectly displayed as "19100." As a result of a major effort taken by programmers near the end of the 20th century, the most severe consequences of this bug were averted.
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The 2012 stock trading disruption involved one such incompatibility between the old API and a new API.
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The Open Technology Institute, run by the group, New America, released a report "Bugs in the System" in August 2016 stating that U.S. policymakers should make reforms to help researchers identify and address software bugs. The report "highlights the need for reform in the field of software vulnerability discovery and disclosure." One of the report's authors said that Congress has not done enough to address cyber software vulnerability, even though Congress has passed a number of bills to combat the larger issue of cyber security.
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Government researchers, companies, and cyber security experts are the people who typically discover software flaws. The report calls for reforming computer crime and copyright laws.
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