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Related papers: Compact Symbolic Execution (technical report)

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We present a generalisation of King's symbolic execution technique called compact symbolic execution. It proceeds in two steps. First, we analyse cyclic paths in the control flow graph of a given program, independently from the rest of the…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2013-09-18 Jiří Slabý , Jan Strejček , Marek Trtík

Symbolic execution is a powerful program analysis technique that allows for the systematic exploration of all program paths. Path explosion, where the number of states to track becomes unwieldy, is one of the biggest challenges hindering…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Joshua Bailey , Charles Nicholas

Symbolic execution is a successful and very popular technique used in software verification and testing. A key limitation of symbolic execution is in dealing with code containing loops. The problem is that even a single loop can generate a…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2011-07-08 Jan Obdrzalek , Marek Trtik

We propose a symbolic execution method for programs that can draw random samples. In contrast to existing work, our method can verify randomized programs with unknown inputs and can prove probabilistic properties that universally quantify…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2022-09-19 Zachary Susag , Sumit Lahiri , Justin Hsu , Subhajit Roy

This paper focuses on generating test cases from timed symbolic transition systems. At the heart of the generation process are symbolic execution techniques on data and time. Test cases look like finite symbolic trees with verdicts on their…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2023-09-14 Boutheina Bannour , Arnault Lapitre , Pascale Le Gall , Thang Nguyen

In previous work, we presented a symbolic execution method which starts with a concrete model of the program but progressively abstracts away details only when these are known to be irrelevant using interpolation. In this paper, we extend…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2011-03-11 Joxan Jaffar , Jorge A. Navas , Andrew E. Santosa

Symbolic execution is an effective path oriented and constraint based program analysis technique. Recently, there is a significant development in the research and application of symbolic execution. However, symbolic execution still suffers…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2015-03-20 Yufeng Zhang , Zhenbang Chen , Ji Wang

Scientific software is, by its very nature, complex. It is mathematical and highly optimized which makes it prone to subtle bugs not as easily detected by traditional testing. We outline how symbolic execution can be used to write tests…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Alexander C. Wilton

We present an algorithm for tests generation tools based on symbolic execution. The algorithm is supposed to help in situations, when a tool is repeatedly failing to cover some code by tests. The algorithm then provides the tool a necessary…

Symbolic Computation · Computer Science 2011-12-21 Marek Trtík

Many security and software testing applications require checking whether certain properties of a program hold for any possible usage scenario. For instance, a tool for identifying software vulnerabilities may need to rule out the existence…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-05-03 Roberto Baldoni , Emilio Coppa , Daniele Cono D'Elia , Camil Demetrescu , Irene Finocchi

Symbolic execution is an important software analysis technique which benefits downstream tasks such as software testing and debugging. However, several limitations hinder symbolic execution from application on real-world software. One of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Wenhan Wang , Kaibo Liu , Zeyu Sun , An Ran Chen , Ge Li , Gang Huang , Lei Ma

Symbolic Execution is a formal method that can be used to verify the behavior of computer programs and detect software vulnerabilities. Compared to other testing methods such as fuzzing, Symbolic Execution has the advantage of providing…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Christopher Scherb , Luc Bryan Heitz , Hermann Grieder , Olivier Mattmann

Symbolic execution is a classic technique for systematic bug finding, which has seen many applications in recent years but remains hard to scale. Recent work introduced ranged symbolic execution to distribute the symbolic execution task…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-06-07 Shikhar Singh , Sarfraz Khurshid

Automatically generating formal specifications including loop invariants, preconditions, and postconditions for legacy code is critical for program understanding, reuse and verification. However, the inherent complexity of control and data…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Fanpeng Yang , Xu Ma , Shuling Wang , Xiong Xu , Qinxiang Cao , Naijun Zhan , Xiaofeng Li , Bin Gu

Symbolic execution is a powerful technique for program analysis. However, it has many limitations in practical applicability: the path explosion problem encumbers scalability, the need for language-specific implementation, the inability to…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2018-07-03 Shiqi Shen , Soundarya Ramesh , Shweta Shinde , Abhik Roychoudhury , Prateek Saxena

Symbolic execution is at the core of many techniques for program analysis and test generation. Traditional symbolic execution of programs with numeric inputs enjoys the property of forking as many analysis traces as the number of analyzed…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Pietro Braione , Giovanni Denaro , Luca Guglielmo

Symbolic execution helps check programs by exploring different paths based on symbolic inputs. Tools like KLEE are commonly used because they can automatically detect bugs and create test cases. But one of KLEE's biggest issues is how slow…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Rong Feng , Vanisha Gupta , Vivek Patel , Viroopaksh Reddy Ernampati , Suman Saha

We present a new approach to automated reasoning about higher-order programs by extending symbolic execution to use behavioral contracts as symbolic values, enabling symbolic approximation of higher-order behavior. Our approach is based on…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2012-04-27 Sam Tobin-Hochstadt , David Van Horn

We present a method of automatically synthesizing steps to solve search problems. Given a specification of a search problem, our approach uses symbolic execution to analyze the specification in order to extract a set of constraints which…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2020-09-24 Mara Downing , Abtin Molavi , Lucas Bang

We present a framework for symbolically executing and model checking higher-order programs with external (open) methods. We focus on the client-library paradigm and in particular we aim to check libraries with respect to any definable…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2020-02-24 Yu-Yang Lin , Nikos Tzevelekos
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