AutoStub: Genetic Programming-Based Stub Creation for Symbolic Execution
Symbolic execution is a powerful technique for software testing, but suffers from limitations when encountering external functions, such as native methods or third-party libraries. Existing solutions often require additional context, expensive SMT solvers, or manual intervention to approximate these functions through symbolic stubs. In this work, we propose a novel approach to automatically generate symbolic stubs for external functions during symbolic execution that leverages Genetic Programming. When the symbolic executor encounters an external function, AutoStub generates training data by executing the function on randomly generated inputs and collecting the outputs. Genetic programming then derives expressions that approximate the behavior of the function, serving as symbolic stubs. These automatically generated stubs allow the symbolic executor to continue the analysis without manual intervention, enabling the exploration of program paths that were previously intractable. We demonstrate that AutoStub can automatically approximate external functions with over 90% accuracy for 55% of the functions evaluated, and can infer language-specific behaviors that reveal edge cases crucial for software testing.
Tue 29 AprDisplayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change
14:00 - 15:30 | Paper Presentations 3 and Tutorial 2SBFT at 104 Chair(s): Matteo Biagiola Università della Svizzera italiana | ||
14:00 15mPaper | AutoStub: Genetic Programming-Based Stub Creation for Symbolic Execution SBFT Felix Mächtle University of Luebeck, Nils Loose University of Luebeck, Jan-Niclas Serr University of Luebeck, Jonas Sander University of Luebeck, Thomas Eisenbarth University of Lübeck | ||
14:15 15mResearch paper | Mimicry-Based Testing of Runtime SQLi Prevention Approaches SBFT Anjana Perera Oracle Labs, Australia, François Gauthier Oracle Labs, Kostyantyn Vorobyov Oracle Labs, Matthew Harris Oracle Labs, Paddy Krishnan Oracle Labs, Australia | ||
14:30 60mTutorial | Tutorial by Miguel Romero-Arjona and Aitor Arrieta SBFT |