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Related papers: A Survey of Symbolic Execution Techniques

200 papers

We present a new approach to automated reasoning about higher-order programs by endowing symbolic execution with a notion of higher-order, symbolic values. Our approach is sound and relatively complete with respect to a first-order solver…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2016-03-22 Phuc C. Nguyen , Sam Tobin-Hochstadt , David Van Horn

This thesis presents an automated method for verifying security properties of protocol implementations written in the C language. We assume that each successful run of a protocol follows the same path through the C code, justified by the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-01-06 Mihhail Aizatulin

Dynamic symbolic execution (DSE) is a powerful method for path exploration during hybrid fuzzing and automatic bug detection. We propose security predicates to effectively detect undefined behavior and memory access violation errors.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-03-23 Alexey Vishnyakov , Vlada Logunova , Eli Kobrin , Daniil Kuts , Darya Parygina , Andrey Fedotov

Symbolic execution is a powerful program analysis technique that can formally reason the correctness of program behaviors and detect software bugs. It can systematically explore the execution paths of the tested program. But it suffers from…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-07 Shuangjie Yao , Dongdong She

We describe a technique for systematic testing of multi-threaded programs. We combine Quasi-Optimal Partial-Order Reduction, a state-of-the-art technique that tackles path explosion due to interleaving non-determinism, with symbolic…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2020-07-23 Daniel Schemmel , Julian Büning , César Rodríguez , David Laprell , Klaus Wehrle

Symbolic execution is a key technology in software testing, which generates test cases by collecting symbolic path constraints and then solving constraints with SMT solvers. Symbolic execution has been proven helpful in generating…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Wenhan Wang , Kaibo Liu , An Ran Chen , Ge Li , Zhi Jin , Gang Huang , Lei Ma

We present SEIF, a methodology that combines static analysis with symbolic execution to verify and explicate information flow paths in a hardware design. SEIF begins with a statically built model of the information flow through a design and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-08-03 Kaki Ryan , Matthew Gregoire , Cynthia Sturton

Certification through auditing allows to ensure that critical embedded systems are secure. This entails reviewing their critical components and checking for dangerous execution paths. This latter task requires the use of specialized tools…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Guilhem Lacombe , David Feliot , Etienne Boespflug , Marie-Laure Potet

In this thesis, we introduce the idea of combining symbolic execution with dynamic analysis for reverse engineering. Differently from DSE, we devise an approach where the reverse engineer can use a debugger to drive and inspect a concrete…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-07-01 Andrea Fioraldi

Software testing is one of the most popular validation techniques in the software industry. Surprisingly, we can only find a few approaches to testing in the context of logic programming. In this paper, we introduce a systematic approach…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2020-02-19 Fred Mesnard , Étienne Payet , Germán Vidal

Probabilistic program analysis aims to quantify the probability that a given program satisfies a required property. It has many potential applications, from program understanding and debugging to computing program reliability, compiler…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2017-09-08 Aleksandar S. Dimovski

Recently efficient model-checking tools have been developed to find flaws in security protocols specifications. These flaws can be interpreted as potential attacks scenarios but the feasability of these scenarios need to be confirmed at the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2013-08-01 Hatem Ghabri , Ghazi Maatoug , Michael Rusinowitch

Quantum protocols such as the BB84 Quantum Key Distribution protocol exchange qubits to achieve information-theoretic security guarantees. Many variants thereof were proposed, some of them being already deployed. Existing security proofs in…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-04-11 Lucca Hirschi

A promising research direction in enabling LLMs to generate consistently correct code involves addressing their inability to properly estimate program execution, particularly for code they generate. In this work, we demonstrate that Code…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Gallil Maimon , Ori Yoran , Felix Kreuk , Michael Hassid , Gal Cohen , Pierre Chambon , Yossi Adi

Instrumenting programs for performing run-time checking of properties, such as regular shapes, is a common and useful technique that helps programmers detect incorrect program behaviors. This is specially true in dynamic languages such as…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2018-04-09 Maximiliano Klemen , Nataliia Stulova , Pedro Lopez-Garcia , José F. Morales , Manuel V. Hermenegildo

Gradual verification, which supports explicitly partial specifications and verifies them with a combination of static and dynamic checks, makes verification more incremental and provides earlier feedback to developers. While an abstract,…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2023-11-14 Conrad Zimmerman , Jenna DiVincenzo , Jonathan Aldrich

Message passing is the standard paradigm of programming in high-performance computing. However, verifying Message Passing Interface (MPI) programs is challenging, due to the complex program features (such as non-determinism and non-blocking…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2020-01-20 Hengbiao Yu , Zhenbang Chen , Xianjin Fu , Ji Wang , Zhendong Su , Jun Sun , Chun Huang , Wei Dong

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional static program analysis methods, such as symbolic execution, offering the ability to reason over code directly without relying on theorem provers or SMT…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Yihe Li , Ruijie Meng , Gregory J. Duck

Symbolic execution detects vulnerabilities with precision, but applying it to large codebases requires harnesses that set up symbolic state, model dependencies, and specify assertions. Writing these harnesses has traditionally been a manual…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Md Shafiuzzaman , Achintya Desai , Wenbo Guo , Tevfik Bultan

In this work, we propose an automated method to identify semantic bugs in student programs, called ATAS, which builds upon the recent advances in both symbolic execution and active learning. Symbolic execution is a program analysis…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-04-17 Ishan Rastogi , Aditya Kanade , Shirish Shevade