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Correct and Complete Symbolic Execution for Free

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Integrated Formal Methods (IFM 2024)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 15234))

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Abstract

Symbolic execution is a powerful technique for program analysis. However, the formal semantics underlying symbolic execution is often developed on an ad-hoc basis and decoupled from the concrete semantics of the programming language. To overcome this issue, we introduce symbolic SOS: a rule format that allows us to simultaneously specify concrete and symbolic operational semantics. We prove that symbolic semantics, when generated from symbolic SOS, is both correct and complete with respect to the corresponding concrete semantics. The approach relies only on an algebraic signature of the source language, and is thus language-independent.

This research is partially supported by the NWO grant No. OCENW.M20.053, ERC grant Autoprobe (no. 101002697) and a Royal Society Wolfson fellowship.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We assume that this always results in a Boolean expression; abstracting from program-level type correctness.

  2. 2.

    Not to be confused with substitutions of values or expressions.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful questions and feedback.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Erik Voogd, Einar Broch Johnsen & Åsmund Aqissiaq Arild Kløvstad

  2. Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Jurriaan Rot

  3. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Alexandra Silva

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  1. Erik Voogd
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Correspondence to Erik Voogd .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Thales Research and Technology, Palaiseau, France

    Nikolai Kosmatov

  2. TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Laura Kovács

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Voogd, E., Johnsen, E.B., Kløvstad, Å.A.A., Rot, J., Silva, A. (2025). Correct and Complete Symbolic Execution for Free. In: Kosmatov, N., Kovács, L. (eds) Integrated Formal Methods. IFM 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15234. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-76554-4_13

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