[tor-dev] Help Wanted: Evaluate our Tool for (privacy-preserving) Automated Debugging

[Christian Grothoff]

Hi!

Collecting good bug reports from users is a challenge, as most users are 
unable (or unwilling) to inspect problems in depth. Existing tools to 
automatically report program failures are often problematic as they 
either produce superficial reports or are prone to leaking private 
information (i.e. by including a full snapshot of the process address 
space in the form of a core dump).

At TUM, we are developing Monkey[1], a free software tool that 
automatically generates high-quality privacy-preserving bug reports (for 
C code) which we hope to use for GNUnet and Tor eventually. (It runs 
with GNUnet and Tor already, but might need more work prior to 
real-world use.) We have reproduced and analyzed a set of real-world 
bugs using the system and would now like to study how well developers 
can find the bugs using the extracted information.

Please participate in our public "survey" (or rather, experiment) where 
we measure your performance at identifying bugs based on crash reports 
collected via different methods, including traditional stack traces, 
core dumps (accessed via a live gdb session) and of course Monkey.

So if you can spare the time, please help our efforts by participating 
in our survey[1] and passing the link to your colleagues and friends. 
(Who finds more bugs faster?)

[0]: https://gnunet.org/monkey/
[1]: https://gnunet.org/monkey/survey/index.php/943594?lang=en


Happy hacking!

Christian Grothoff & Markus Teich

p.s.: We'll be happy to talk with you about Monkey at the Tor developer 
meeting in Munich; however, Markus's thesis deadline is earlier...