Concrete Constraint Guided Symbolic Execution

Symbolic execution is a popular program analysis technique. It systematically explores all feasible paths of a program but its scalability is largely limited by the path explosion problem, which causes the number of paths proliferates at runtime. A key idea in existing methods to mitigate this probl...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings / International Conference on Software Engineering pp. 1496 - 1507
Main Authors: Sun, Yue, Yang, Guowei, Lv, Shichao, Li, Zhi, Sun, Limin
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: ACM 14.04.2024
Subjects:
Codes
Data Dependency Analysis
Data mining
Explosions
Runtime
Scalability
Security
Symbolic Execution
ISSN:1558-1225
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Symbolic execution is a popular program analysis technique. It systematically explores all feasible paths of a program but its scalability is largely limited by the path explosion problem, which causes the number of paths proliferates at runtime. A key idea in existing methods to mitigate this problem is to guide the selection of states for path exploration, which primarily relies on the features to represent program states. In this paper, we propose concrete constraint guided symbolic execution, which aims to cover more concrete branches and ultimately improve the overall code coverage during symbolic execution. Our key insight is based on the fact that symbolic execution strives to cover all symbolic branches while concrete branches are neglected, and directing symbolic execution toward uncovered concrete branches has a great potential to improve the overall code coverage. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach can improve the ability of KLEE to both increase code coverage and find more security violations on 10 open-source C programs.
ISSN:1558-1225
DOI:10.1145/3597503.3639078