research-article

Scaling Up Symbolic Analysis by Removing Z-Equivalent States

Authors:

Yepang LiuAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), Volume 23, Issue 4

Article No.: 34, Pages 1 - 32

https://doi.org/10.1145/2652484

Published: 05 September 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Path explosion is a major issue in applying path-sensitive symbolic analysis to large programs. We observe that many symbolic states generated by the symbolic analysis of a procedure are indistinguishable to its callers. It is, therefore, possible to keep only one state from each set of equivalent symbolic states without affecting the analysis result. Based on this observation, we propose an equivalence relation called z-equivalence, which is weaker than logical equivalence, to relate a large number of z-equivalent states. We prove that z-equivalence is strong enough to guarantee that paths to be traversed by the symbolic analysis of two z-equivalent states are identical, giving the same solutions to satisfiability and validity queries. We propose a sound linear algorithm to detect z-equivalence. Our experiments show that the symbolic analysis that leverages z-equivalence is able to achieve more than ten orders of magnitude reduction in terms of search space. The reduction significantly alleviates the path explosion problem, enabling us to apply symbolic analysis in large programs such as Hadoop and Linux Kernel.

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Cited By

Sabbaghi AKeyvanpour M(2020)A Systematic Review of Search Strategies in Dynamic Symbolic ExecutionComputer Standards & Interfaces10.1016/j.csi.2020.103444(103444)Online publication date: May-2020
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csi.2020.103444
Xuan JMartinez MDeMarco FClement MMarcote SDurieux TLe Berre DMonperrus M(2019)NopolIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2016.256081143:1(34-55)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2016.2560811
Sabbaghi ARashidy Kanan HKeyvanpour M(2019)FSCT: A new fuzzy search strategy in concolic testingInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2018.11.006107(137-158)Online publication date: Mar-2019
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2018.11.006
Show More Cited By

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Scaling Up Symbolic Analysis by Removing Z-Equivalent States

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cover image ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology Volume 23, Issue 4

Special Issue International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2012) and Regular Papers

August 2014

232 pages

ISSN:1049-331X

EISSN:1557-7392

DOI:10.1145/2668018

Editors:
David S. Rosenblum
National University of Singapore, Singapore
,
Gail C. Murphy,
Mauro Pezzé

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 05 September 2014

Accepted: 01 March 2014

Revised: 01 February 2014

Received: 01 July 2013

Published in TOSEM Volume 23, Issue 4

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Cited By

Sabbaghi AKeyvanpour M(2020)A Systematic Review of Search Strategies in Dynamic Symbolic ExecutionComputer Standards & Interfaces10.1016/j.csi.2020.103444(103444)Online publication date: May-2020
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csi.2020.103444
Xuan JMartinez MDeMarco FClement MMarcote SDurieux TLe Berre DMonperrus M(2019)NopolIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2016.256081143:1(34-55)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2016.2560811
Sabbaghi ARashidy Kanan HKeyvanpour M(2019)FSCT: A new fuzzy search strategy in concolic testingInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2018.11.006107(137-158)Online publication date: Mar-2019
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2018.11.006
Yang GFilieri ABorges MClun DWen J(2018)Advances in Symbolic Execution10.1016/bs.adcom.2018.10.002Online publication date: 2018
https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.adcom.2018.10.002
Li YCheung SCrnkovic IChechik MGrünbacher P(2014)Symbolic state validation through runtime dataProceedings of the 29th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/2642937.2642973(187-198)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2642937.2642973

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