Symbolic execution is a powerful program analysis technique that systematically explores multiple program paths. However, despite important technical advances, symbolic execution often struggles to reach deep parts of the code due to the well-known path explosion problem and constraint solving limitations. In this paper, we propose chopped symbolic execution, a novel form of symbolic execution that allows users to specify uninteresting parts of the code to exclude during the analysis, thus only targeting the exploration to paths of importance. However, the excluded parts are not summarily ignored, as this may lead to both false positives and false negatives. Instead, they are executed lazily, when their effect may be observable by code under analysis. Chopped symbolic execution leverages various on-demand static analyses at runtime to automatically exclude code fragments while resolving their side effects, thus avoiding expensive manual annotations and imprecision. Our preliminary results show that the approach can effectively improve the effectiveness of symbolic execution in several different scenarios, including failure reproduction and test suite augmentation.
Chopped Symbolic Execution: Presentation (cse-icse.pdf) | 1.49MiB |
Wed 30 MayDisplayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change
16:00 - 17:30 | |||
16:00 20mTalk | Spatio-Temporal Context Reduction: A Pointer-Analysis-Based Static Approach for Detecting Use-After-Free Vulnerabilities Technical Papers Hua Yan University of New South Wales, Yulei Sui University of Technology Sydney, Australia, Shiping Chen Data61 at CSIRO, Australia / UNSW, Australia, Jingling Xue UNSW Sydney | ||
16:20 20mTalk | Program Splicing Technical Papers | ||
16:40 20mTalk | Chopped Symbolic Execution Technical Papers David Trabish Tel Aviv University, Andrea Mattavelli Imperial College London, Noam Rinetzky Tel Aviv University, Cristian Cadar Imperial College London Link to publication File Attached | ||
17:00 20mTalk | Perses: Syntax-Guided Program Reduction Technical Papers Chengnian Sun University of California, Davis, Yuanbo Li , Qirun Zhang University of California, Davis, Tianxiao Gu , Zhendong Su University of California, Davis | ||
17:20 10mTalk | Q&A in groups Technical Papers |