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Targeted program transformations for symbolic execution

Author:

Cristian CadarAuthors Info & Claims

ESEC/FSE 2015: Proceedings of the 2015 10th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering

Pages 906 - 909

https://doi.org/10.1145/2786805.2803205

Published: 30 August 2015 Publication History

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Abstract

Semantics-preserving program transformations, such as refactorings and optimisations, can have a significant impact on the effectiveness of symbolic execution testing and analysis. Furthermore, semantics-preserving transformations that increase the performance of native execution can in fact decrease the scalability of symbolic execution. Similarly, semantics-altering transformations, such as type changes and object size modifications, can often lead to substantial improvements in the testing effectiveness achieved by symbolic execution in the original program. As a result, we argue that one should treat program transformations as first-class ingredients of scalable symbolic execution, alongside widely-accepted aspects such as search heuristics and constraint solving optimisations. First, we propose to understand the impact of existing program transformations on symbolic execution, to increase scalability and improve experimental design and reproducibility. Second, we argue for the design of testability transformations specifically targeted toward more scalable symbolic execution.

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Cited By

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Wang HMa PWang STang QNie SWu S(2023)sem2vec: Semantics-aware Assembly Tracelet EmbeddingACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/356993332:4(1-34)Online publication date: 27-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3569933
Wang CFan GYao PPan FZhang CGrundy JPollock LPenta M(2023)Verifying Data Constraint Equivalence in FinTech SystemsProceedings of the 45th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00117(1329-1341)Online publication date: 14-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00117
Wei GJia SGao RDeng HTan SBračevac ORompf T(2023)Compiling Parallel Symbolic Execution with Continuations2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00116(1316-1328)Online publication date: May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00116
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Index Terms

Targeted program transformations for symbolic execution
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging

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Published In

ESEC/FSE 2015: Proceedings of the 2015 10th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering

August 2015

1068 pages

ISBN:9781450336758

DOI:10.1145/2786805

General Chair:
Elisabetta Di Nitto
Politecnico di Milano, Italy
,
Program Chairs:
Mark Harman
University College London, UK
,
Patrick Heymans
University of Namur, Belgium

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 30 August 2015

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EPSRC

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ESEC/FSE'15

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SIGSOFT

ESEC/FSE'15: Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

August 30 - September 4, 2015

Bergamo, Italy

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Overall Acceptance Rate 112 of 543 submissions, 21%

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Cited By

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Wang HMa PWang STang QNie SWu S(2023)sem2vec: Semantics-aware Assembly Tracelet EmbeddingACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/356993332:4(1-34)Online publication date: 27-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3569933
Wang CFan GYao PPan FZhang CGrundy JPollock LPenta M(2023)Verifying Data Constraint Equivalence in FinTech SystemsProceedings of the 45th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00117(1329-1341)Online publication date: 14-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00117
Wei GJia SGao RDeng HTan SBračevac ORompf T(2023)Compiling Parallel Symbolic Execution with Continuations2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00116(1316-1328)Online publication date: May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00116
Busse FGharat PCadar CDonaldson ARyu SSmaragdakis Y(2022)Combining static analysis error traces with dynamic symbolic execution (experience paper)Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3533767.3534384(568-579)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3533767.3534384
Li ZMa PWang HWang STang QNie SWu SDwyer MDamian DZeller A(2022)Unleashing the power of compiler intermediate representation to enhance neural program embeddingsProceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3510003.3510217(2253-2265)Online publication date: 21-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3510003.3510217
Saumya CSundararajah KKulkarni MLee J(2022)DARMProceedings of the 20th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.1109/CGO53902.2022.9741285(28-40)Online publication date: 2-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/CGO53902.2022.9741285
Shen J(2021)The Impact of Compiler Optimizations on Symbolic Execution2021 IEEE International Conference on Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Electronic Engineering (CSAIEE)10.1109/CSAIEE54046.2021.9543388(161-165)Online publication date: 20-Aug-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/CSAIEE54046.2021.9543388
Hong WLiu YChen ZDong WWang J(2020)Modified condition/decision coverage (MC/DC) oriented compiler optimization for symbolic executionFrontiers of Information Technology & Electronic Engineering10.1631/FITEE.190021321:9(1267-1284)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2020
https://doi.org/10.1631/FITEE.1900213
Guo SChen YYu JWu MZuo ZLi PCheng YWang H(2020)Exposing cache timing side-channel leaks through out-of-order symbolic executionProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34282154:OOPSLA(1-32)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3428215
Yao PShi QHuang HZhang CKhurshid SPăsăreanu C(2020)Fast bit-vector satisfiabilityProceedings of the 29th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3395363.3397378(38-50)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3395363.3397378
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