Language-Based Testing and Debugging

Andreas Zeller, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security

Joint work with Dominic Steinhöfel and the CISPA team

If one knows the input language of a software system, one can use it for generating test inputs or for determining input patterns that cause specific behavior. But how does one specify an input language such that all properties of inputs are covered? In this talk, I introduce the ISLa specification language, combining grammars and constraints over nonterminals to capture even the most complex input languages. ISLa serves as a fuzzer, allowing to test programs with a large variety of inputs systematically, but also as a parser, decomposing inputs and outputs into individual elements. This opens up new directions for debugging, determining the exact conditions under which a program fails: “The program fails if the is given and < 0 holds.” Includes live demos!

Andreas Zeller is faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, and professor for Software Engineering at Saarland University. His research on automated debugging, mining software archives, specification mining, and security testing has been highly influential. Andreas is one of the few researchers to have received two ERC Advanced Grants, most recently for his S3 project. He is an ACM Fellow and holds an ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award.

You can find Andreas on Mastodon as @AndreasZeller@mastodon.social and on Twitter as @AndreasZeller.