Topological Differential Testing
Software Engineering
2020-03-06 v2 Algebraic Topology
Abstract
We introduce topological differential testing (TDT), an approach to extracting the consensus behavior of a set of programs on a corpus of inputs. TDT uses the topological notion of a simplicial complex (and implicitly draws on richer topological notions such as sheaves and persistence) to determine inputs that cause inconsistent behavior and in turn reveal \emph{de facto} input specifications. We gently introduce TDT with a toy example before detailing its application to understanding the PDF file format from the behavior of various parsers. Finally, we discuss theoretical details and other possible applications.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2003.00976,
title = {Topological Differential Testing},
author = {Kristopher Ambrose and Steve Huntsman and Michael Robinson and Matvey Yutin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.00976},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
Fixed Figure 5 (was flipped)