Research funded in part by the National Science Foundation^1,2, CyLab^1,2,3,4, and Amazon.

Members

Current

Alumni & Friends

Research

The PASTA group conducts research on Program Analysis, Software Testing, and Applications thereof. We are not afraid of spaghetti code. We often use dynamic analysis and grey-box fuzzing to identify software bugs or achieve other software engineering objectives.

Publications

• Fray: An Efficient General-Purpose Concurrency Testing Platform for the JVM
  Ao Li, Byeongjee Kang, Vasudev Vikram, Isabella Laybourn, Samvid Dharanikota, Shrey Tiwari, Rohan Padhye
  Under Peer-Review (Preprint)
• It's About Time: An Empirical Study of Date and Time Bugs in Open-Source Python Software
  Shrey Tiwari, Serena Chen*, Alexander Joukov*, Peter Vandervelde*, Ao Li, Rohan Padhye
  MSR 2025 (Preprint) [* = equal contribution]
• Can Large Language Models Write Good Property-Based Tests?
  Vasudev Vikram, Caroline Lemieux, Rohan Padhye
  (Arxiv Preprint | Online playground)
• SPIDER: Fuzzing for Stateful Performance Issues in the ONOS Software-Defined Network Controller
  Ao Li, Rohan Padhye, Vyas Sekar
  ICST 2025 (to appear | Preprint)
• The Havoc Paradox in Generator-Based Fuzzing (Registered Report)
  FUZZING 2024 (DOI | Paper PDF)
  Ao Li, Madonna Huang, Caroline Lemieux, and Rohan Padhye
• ExChain: Exception Dependency Analysis for Root Cause Diagnosis
  Ao Li, Shan Lu, Suman Nath, Rohan Padhye, Vyas Sekar
  NSDI 2024 (Publication | GitHub)
• Guiding Greybox Fuzzing with Mutation Testing
  Vasudev Vikram, Isabella Laybourn, Ao Li, Nicole Nair, Kelton OBrien, Rafaello Sanna, Rohan Padhye
  ISSTA 2023 (Publication | GitHub) ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
• On the Naturalness of Fuzzer-Generated Code
  Rajeswari Hita Kambhamettu*, John R Billos*, Tomi Oluwaseun-Apo*, Benjamin Gafford, Rohan Padhye, Vincent J Hellendoorn
  MSR 2022 (Publication) [* = equal contribution]

Ethos

Open Science

For science to make rapid and sustained progress, we believe that academic research should be made openly accessible, reproducible, and where artifacts exist, also directly reusable. To this end, we make the following commitments:

• We only publish in venues that are at least Green Open Access (e.g., conferences and journals that are run by USENIX, ACM, or IEEE).
• Upon publication of any research results, the corresponding artifacts and tools produced by our group will be made open-source and publicly available under a permissive license such as a Creative Commons or MIT License, as appropriate.
• For research involving quantitative empirical results, we will make every effort to release artifacts that facilitate independent reproduction or validation of those results (e.g., as a Docker container with a DOI).
• Where possible, we will participate in artifact evaluation.

Ethics

We also believe in being responsible members of society and in working towards scientific advancement for good, not evil. We implement this outlook in the following ways:

• As computing professionals, we adopt the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.
• Our research is not funded by military agencies. (Why does this matter? See Ben Kuipers' excellent article on this subject.)
• In matters of computer security, we follow industry-standard responsible disclosure practices (e.g., as adopted by CERT or IETF).

Join Us

If our research and ethos are appealing to you, consider joining our group!

Prospective graduate students should apply to the Software Engineering PhD program at CMU.

Undergraduate students in the US can apply to the REUSE program to join our group for a summer.

If you are already enrolled in CMU as a student, send us an email from your Andrew address.

Alternatively, look out for one us at an ICSE.