CodeMechanic: Bug-Property-Guided Program Mitigation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22275v1
• Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2026 08:06:47 GMT
• Title: CodeMechanic: Bug-Property-Guided Program Mitigation
• Abstract summary: We present CodeMechanic, a bug-property-guided system for generating constrained mit- igations for memory corruption.<n>Instead of asking an LLM to generate a permanent repair, CodeMechanic reconstructs the violated memory-safety property from the crash.<n>CodeMechanic produces 3.4x - 4.3x more patches semantically equivalent to developer-written repairs.
• Score: 23.976869967674435
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Automated testing discovers vulnerabilities faster than developers can investigate and repair them, leaving an interval in which known memory corruptions remain exploitable. End- to-end LLM repair agents can shorten this interval, but they synthesize open-ended code changes and commonly validate them only by replaying a proof of concept (PoC). This weak oracle accepts patches that silence the observed crash by changing unrelated behavior, making unintended deployment risky. We present CodeMechanic, a bug-property-guided system for generating constrained mit- igations for spatial memory corruption. Instead of asking an LLM to generate a permanent repair, CodeMechanic reconstructs the violated memory-safety property from the crash, validates the dereferenced pointer and its buffer range, and inserts a local fail-stop guard before the dangerous access. The guard terminates execution when the boundary check fails. The resulting mitigation deliberately trades availability for security: it can convert potential remote code execution into controlled termination while developers investigate the root cause and prepare a permanent repair. CodeMechanic combines a two-dimensional static and dynamic context extractor with in-prompt debugging knowledge and stepwise val- idation to limit the effect of LLM errors. On 101 real-world ARVO bugs, the first attempt of CodeMechanic produces 47.6% more plausible patches (i.e., patches that pass PoC- replay validation) than the best baseline while using 91% fewer tokens. Manual audit further shows that CodeMechanic produces 3.4x - 4.3x more patches semantically equivalent to developer-written repairs.

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