Symbolic execution for software testing three decades later a legacy

Unit testing is widely used in software development. Three decades later cristian cadar, koushik sen communications of the acm cacm volume 56, issue 2, 20 safe software updates via multiversion execution petr hosek, cristian cadar international conference on software engineering icse 20 san francisco, ca, may 20. Abstract visual dramatization of intrusion detection software testing and reverse engineering of software can be aided by genetic algorithms known as fuzzing and concolic execution. Proceedings of the ieeeacm international conference on automated software engineering. Improvements of directed automated random testing in test.

C cadar, p godefroid, s khurshid, cs pasareanu, k sen, n. Parallel symbolic execution for automated realworld. Existing automated techniques, like model checking and symbolic execution, are highly effective cadar 2008, holzmann 2008, but their adoption in industrial generalpurpose software testing has been limited. Each execution state, labeled with an upper case letter, shows the statement to be executed, the symbolic store. Interoperabilityguided testing of quic implementations. Constraintbased test data generation is a technique for automatic generation of test data, which uses symbolic execution to generate constraints. Citeseerx document details isaac councill, lee giles, pradeep teregowda. By cristian cadar and koushik sen symbolic execution. Klee symbolic execution tester, llvm program analysis platform papers on automatic exploit construction using satsmt solvers. In software testing, symbolic execution is used to generate a test input for each execution path of a program. Lecture 25 automated test generation using symbolic execution.

We have developed symbolic java pathfinder, a symbolic execution framework that implements a nonstandard bytecode interpreter on top of the java pathfinder model checking tool. Symbolic execution is a program analysis technique that was introduced in the 70s 8,15,31,35,46, and that has found renewed interest in recent years 9,12,28,29,32,33,40,42, 43,5052,56,57. In proceedings of the theory and practice of software, 14th international conference on tools and algorithms for the construction and. Searchbased detection of deviation failures in the. A feasible execution path is a sequence of true and false, where a value of true respectively false at the thi position in the sequence denotes that the ith conditional statement encountered along the. Wei les slides on program analysis note that the course schedule page doesnt list the symbolic execution slides 6. Symbolic execution is a software testing technique that is useful to aid the generation of test data and in proving the program quality. Traditionally, fuzz testing tools apply random mutations to wellformed inputs of a program and test the resulting values.

Augmenting fuzzing through selective symbolic execution aeg. Dynamic symbolic execution dse is an efficient smtbased path enumeration technique used in software testing. The software reliability group at imperial college london has invested a significant amount of effort in the last few years on devising techniques and tools for comprehensively testing software patches. Analyzing semantic correctness with symbolic execution. In this work in progress, we consider here the case of guided dse, where the paths to enumerate should be part of a given program slice. In this article, we give an overview of modern symbolic execution techniques, discuss their key challenges in terms. Guided dynamic symbolic execution using subgraph control. A survey of new trends in symbolic execution for software testing. In software testing, symbolic execution is used to generate a test input for each feasible execution path of a program. Recent years have witnessed a surge of interest in symbolic execution for software testing, due to its ability to generate highcoverage test suites and find deep errors in complex software applications. Symbolic execution the symbolic execution of a program is described in this section in an ideal sense, and then, in section 6, a. Soft international symposium on software testing and analysis issta18.

We present an alternative whitebox fuzz testing approach inspired by recent advances in symbolic execution and dynamic test. Three decades later, journal communications of the association for computing machinery cacm 20. The challengesand great promiseof modern symbolic execution techniques, and the tools to help implement them. Software testing debugging is extremely time consuming, and hence techniques to automate debugging or program repair are of value. Symbolic execution is used to reason about a program pathbypath which is an advantage over reasoning about a program inputbyinput as other testing paradigms use e. Interoperabilityguided testing of quic implementations using symbolic execution. Hybrid testing methods attempt to mitigate these problems by leveraging dynamic symbolic execution to assist fuzz testing. Our group publishes in top venues in the areas of software engineering, software testing and verification, computer systems and computer security. Generalized symbolic execution for model checking and testing. Rather than replace existing software testing techniques, such as test case writing, they complement existing software testing efforts in novel ways. Three decades later cadar and sen a few billion lines of code later using static analysis. However, on their own, both techniques suffer from scalability problems when considering the complexity of modern software.

Unassisted and automatic generation of highcoverage tests for complex systems programs cadar et. However, if few inputs take the same path through the program, there is little savings over testing each of the inputs separately. Modern symbolic execution austin cory bart cs6304 program analysis 11102015. Sean heelan and david brumley specifically focus on the bap paper, automatic exploit generation aeg paper, and the q paper. A bibliography of papers related to symbolic execution. Symbolic execution for software testing in practice. Mayur naiks lecture videos on software testing and analysis mary jean harrolds slides under the topic column on program analysis including datacontrol dependency, slicing, etc. Symbolic execution has become an effective program testing technique, providing a way to automatically generate inputs that trigger software errors ranging from lowlevel program crashes to higherlevel semantic properties generate test suites that achieve high program coverage. Unit test data generation for c using ruledirected. In this talk, i will discuss the use of symbolic execution for software testing, debugging and repair. The execution requires a selection of paths that are exercised by a set of data values. Generalized symbolic execution for model checking and testing sarfraz khurshid1, corina s. Combining unitlevel symbolic execution and systemlevel. Symbolic execution for software testing in practice preliminary assessment.

Armando solarlezama in this lecture, professor solarlezama from mit csail presents the concept of symbolic execution. Comprehensively testing software patches with symbolic. The main reason for the standardization of network protocols, like quic, is to ensure interoperability between implementations, which poses a. The main focus of our work has been on developing dynamic symbolic execution techniques that automatically detect bugs and augment program test suites. Selecta formal system for testing and debugging programs by symbolic execution. If the correctness criteria for the given program is described by a set of test cases, we will show that.

Discover deeper bugs with dynamic symbolic execution and. We thank matt dwyer for his advice permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of. Role of symbolic execution in software testing, debugging. Symbolic execution and program testing james king klee. Symbolic execution is typically used in software testing to explore as many different program paths as possible in a given amount of time, and for each path to.