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Related papers: A Survey of Symbolic Execution Techniques

200 papers

We introduce a novel copy-protection method for industrial control software. With our method, a program executes correctly only on its target hardware and behaves differently on other machines. The hardware-software binding is based on…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Daniel Dorfmeister , Flavio Ferrarotti , Bernhard Fischer , Evelyn Haslinger , Rudolf Ramler , Markus Zimmermann

With advances in quantum computing, researchers can now write and run many quantum programs. However, there is still a lack of effective methods for debugging quantum programs. In this paper, quantum symbolic execution (QSE) is proposed to…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-09-20 Jiang Nan , Wang Zichen , Wang Jian

In so-called constraint-based testing, symbolic execution is a common technique used as a part of the process to generate test data for imperative programs. Databases are ubiquitous in software and testing of programs manipulating databases…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2015-01-26 Michaël Marcozzi , Wim Vanhoof , Jean-Luc Hainaut

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 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

Symbolic execution is an SMT-based software verification and testing technique. Symbolic execution requires tracking performed computations during software simulation to reason about branches in the software under test. The prevailing…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Sören Tempel , Tobias Brandt , Christoph Lüth , Christian Dietrich , Rolf Drechsler

We introduce a novel technique for finding real errors in programs. The technique is based on a synergy of three well-known methods: metacompilation, slicing, and symbolic execution. More precisely, we instrument a given program with a code…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2012-01-24 Jiří Slabý , Jan Strejček , Marek Trtík

Runtime Verification deals with the question of whether a run of a system adheres to its specification. This paper studies runtime verification in the presence of partial knowledge about the observed run, particularly where input values may…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2022-07-13 Hannes Kallwies , Martin Leucker , Cesar Sanchez

Behavioral software contracts are a widely used mechanism for governing the flow of values between components. However, run-time monitoring and enforcement of contracts imposes significant overhead and delays discovery of faulty components…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2014-06-17 Phuc C. Nguyen , Sam Tobin-Hochstadt , David Van Horn

Dynamic symbolic execution is a widely used technique for automated software testing, designed for execution paths exploration and program errors detection. A hybrid approach has recently become widespread, when the main goal of symbolic…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-03-23 Daniil Kuts

Symbolic execution is a powerful verification tool for hardware designs, but suffers from the path explosion problem. We introduce a new approach, piecewise composition, which leverages the modular structure of hardware to transfer the work…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-04-13 Kaki Ryan , Cynthia Sturton

Many important hyperproperties, such as refinement and generalized non-interference, fall into the class of $\forall\exists$ hyperproperties and require, for each execution trace of a system, the existence of another trace relating to the…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Arthur Correnson , Tobias Niessen , Bernd Finkbeiner , Georg Weissenbacher

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

Dynamic symbolic execution (DSE) provides a precise means to analyze programs and it can be used to generate test cases and to detect a variety of bugs including memory vulnerabilities. However, the path explosion problem may prevent a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Tuba Yavuz

Symbolic computation is an important approach in automated program analysis. Most state-of-the-art tools perform symbolic computation as interpreters and directly maintain symbolic data. In this paper, we show that it is feasible, and in…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2019-07-10 Henrich Lauko , Petr Ročkai , Jiří Barnat

Regression testing ensures that a software system when it evolves still performs correctly and that the changes introduce no unintended side-effects. However, the creation of regression test cases that show divergent behavior needs a lot of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-02-07 Yannic Noller , Hoang Lam Nguyen , Minxing Tang , Timo Kehrer

Existing support for regular expressions in automated test generation or verification tools is lacking. Common aspects of regular expression engines found in mainstream programming languages, such as backreferences or greedy matching, are…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2020-03-16 Blake Loring , Duncan Mitchell , Johannes Kinder

Consider the problem of verifying security properties of a cryptographic protocol coded in C. We propose an automatic solution that needs neither a pre-existing protocol description nor manual annotation of source code. First, symbolically…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2011-07-07 Mihhail Aizatulin , Andrew D. Gordon , Jan Jürjens

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

Control flow in unstructured programs can be complex and dynamic, which makes static analysis difficult. Yet, automated reasoning about unstructured control flow is important when certifying properties of binary (machine) code in…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Andreas Lindner , Karl Palmskog , Scott Constable , Mads Dam , Roberto Guanciale , Hamed Nemati