English
Related papers

Related papers: A Survey of Symbolic Execution Techniques

200 papers

Automated test generation based on symbolic execution can be beneficial for systematically testing safety-critical software, to facilitate test engineers to pursue the strict testing requirements mandated by the certification standards,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-09-23 Elson Kurian , Daniela Briola , Pietro Braione , Giovanni Denaro

Symbolic execution is a powerful systematic software analysis technique, but suffers from the high cost of constraint solving, which is the key supporting technology that affects the effectiveness of symbolic execution. Techniques like…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-03-19 Junye Wen , Mujahid Khan , Meiru Che , Yan Yan , Guowei Yang

Symbolic execution has shown its ability to find security-relevant flaws in software, but faces significant scalability challenges. There is a commonly held belief that manual intervention by an expert can help alleviate these limiting…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-05-10 John Galea , Sean Heelan , Daniel Neville , Daniel Kroening

Testing has become an indispensable activity of software development, yet writing good and relevant tests remains a quite challenging task. One well-known problem is that it often is impossible or unrealistic to test for every outcome, as…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2017-08-18 Dimitri Racordon , Didier Buchs

Program obfuscation is a widely employed approach for software intellectual property protection. However, general obfuscation methods (e.g., lexical obfuscation, control obfuscation) implemented in mainstream obfuscation tools are heuristic…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2017-10-04 Hui Xu , Yangfan Zhou , Yu Kang , Michael R. Lyu

Symbolic execution has always been plagued by the inability to handle programs that require highly structured inputs. Most often, the symbolic execution engine gets overwhelmed by the sheer number of infeasible paths and fails to explore…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Anay Mehrotra , Ayush Bansal , Awanish Pandey , Subhajit Roy

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

Software contracts allow programmers to state rich program properties using the full expressive power of an object language. However, since they are enforced at runtime, monitoring contracts imposes significant overhead and delays error…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2017-11-13 Phuc C. Nguyen , Thomas Gilray , Sam Tobin-Hochstadt , David Van Horn

Dynamically typed languages, like Erlang, allow developers to quickly write programs without explicitly providing any type information on expressions or function definitions. However, this feature makes those languages less reliable than…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2018-09-14 Emanuele De Angelis , Fabio Fioravanti , Adrián Palacios , Alberto Pettorossi , Maurizio Proietti

In this paper we present a comparative study of path feasibility queries generated during path exploration based software engineering methods. Symbolic execution based methods are gaining importance in different aspects of software…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2013-02-21 Asankhaya Sharma

Organizations that develop software have recognized that software process models are particularly useful for maintaining a high standard of quality. In the last decade, simulations of software processes were used in several settings and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2014-02-24 Holger Neu , Thomas Hanne , Jürgen Münch , Stefan Nickel , Andreas Wirsen

Conventional tools for formal hardware/software co-verification use bounded model checking techniques to construct a single monolithic propositional formula. Formulas generated in this way are extremely complex and contain a great deal of…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2020-01-07 Rajdeep Mukherjee , Saurabh Joshi , John O'Leary , Daniel Kroening , Tom Melham

Software security is of utmost importance for most software systems. Developers must systematically select, plan, design, implement, and especially, maintain and evolve security features -- functionalities to mitigate attacks or protect…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Kevin Hermann , Sven Peldszus , Jan-Philipp Steghöfer , Thorsten Berger

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

Security must be considered in almost every software system. Unfortunately, selecting and implementing security features remains challenging due to the variety of security threats and possible countermeasures. While security standards are…

Symbolic execution is a widely used technique for test generation, offering systematic exploration of program paths through constraint solving. However, it is fundamentally constrained by the capability to model the target code, including…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Yaoxuan Wu , Xiaojie Zhou , Ahmad Humayun , Muhammad Ali Gulzar , Miryung Kim

In modern software development, vulnerability detection is crucial due to the inevitability of bugs and vulnerabilities in complex software systems. Effective detection and elimination of these vulnerabilities during the testing phase are…

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

The main reason for the standardization of network protocols, like QUIC, is to ensure interoperability between implementations, which poses a challenging task. Manual tests are currently used to test the different existing implementations…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-11-30 Felix Rath , Daniel Schemmel , Klaus Wehrle

Software model checking constitutes an undecidable problem and, as such, even an ideal tool will in some cases fail to give a conclusive answer. In practice, software model checkers fail often and usually do not provide any information on…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2017-08-21 Rodrigo Castaño , Victor Braberman , Diego Garbervetsky , Sebastian Uchitel

In top-down multi-level design methodologies, design descriptions at higher levels of abstraction are incrementally refined to the final realizations. Simulation based techniques have traditionally been used to verify that such model…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2013-08-02 Salim Ismail Al-Akhras , Sofiène Tahar , Gabriela Nicolescu , Michel Langevin , Pierre Paulin