Researchers are adding bugs to experimental software code to reduce the number of software bugs. The idea is to insert a known quantity of vulnerabilities into code, then see how many of them are discovered by bug-finding tools. Researchers at New York University created large-scale automated vulnerability addition (LAVA), which is a low-cost technique. Their automated platform was far less expensive than the alternative of custom-designed vulnerabilities that can sport price tags of tens of thousands of dollars. The team inserted into programs a known number of what it calls synthetic vulnerabilities.”]