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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

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

Spectre attacks disclosed in early 2018 expose data leakage scenarios via cache side channels. Specifically, speculatively executed paths due to branch mis-prediction may bring secret data into the cache which are then exposed via cache…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Guanhua Wang , Sudipta Chattopadhyay , Arnab Kumar Biswas , Tulika Mitra , Abhik Roychoudhury

In the context of model-driven development, ensuring the correctness and consistency of evolving models is paramount. This paper investigates the application of Dynamic Symbolic Execution (DSE) for semantic difference analysis of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Johanna Grahl , Bernhard Rumpe , Max Stachon , Sebastian Stüber

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 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

Software vulnerabilities are a challenge in cybersecurity. Manual security patches are often difficult and slow to be deployed, while new vulnerabilities are created. Binary code vulnerability detection is less studied and more complex…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-04-15 Litao Li , Steven H. H. Ding , Andrew Walenstein , Philippe Charland , Benjamin C. M. Fung

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

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 now becomes an indispensable technique for software testing and program analysis. There are several symbolic execution tools available off-the-shelf, and we need a practical benchmark approach to learn their capabilities.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-05-28 Hui Xu , Zirui Zhao , Yangfan Zhou , Michael R. Lyu

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

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

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

This paper presents Mathematical Execution (ME), a new, unified approach for testing numerical code. The key idea is to (1) capture the desired testing objective via a representing function and (2) transform the automated testing problem to…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2016-10-05 Zhoulai Fu , Zhendong Su

Building robust and general reasoning ability is a central goal in the development of large language models (LLMs). Recent efforts increasingly turn to code as a rich training source, given its inherent logical structure and diverse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Nuo Chen , Zehua Li , Keqin Bao , Junyang Lin , Dayiheng Liu

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

Deep Neural Networks (DNN) are increasingly used in a variety of applications, many of them with substantial safety and security concerns. This paper introduces DeepCheck, a new approach for validating DNNs based on core ideas from program…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-07-30 Divya Gopinath , Kaiyuan Wang , Mengshi Zhang , Corina S. Pasareanu , Sarfraz Khurshid

In industrial and open-source software engineering tasks, developers often perform project-wise code editing tasks, including feature enhancement, refactoring, and bug fixing, where the leading AI models are expected to support the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Chenyan Liu , Yun Lin , Yuhuan Huang , Jiaxin Chang , Binhang Qi , Bo Jiang , Zhiyong Huang , Jin Song Dong

Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) provide hardware-enforced isolation that protects sensitive code and data from untrusted software. Despite their strong security guarantees, analyzing TEE applications remains challenging due to the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Chengyan Ma , Jieke Shi , Ruidong Han , Ye Liu , Yuqing Niu , David Lo