Related papers: SN4KE: Practical Mutation Testing at Binary Level

Understanding binary code is an essential but complex software engineering task for reverse engineering, malware analysis, and compiler optimization. Unlike source code, binary code has limited semantic information, which makes it…

Deep learning (DL) defines a new data-driven programming paradigm where the internal system logic is largely shaped by the training data. The standard way of evaluating DL models is to examine their performance on a test dataset. The…

Software testing is the important phase of software development process. But, this phase can be easily missed by software developers because of their limited time to complete the project. Since, software developers finish their software…

Mutation testing is the state-of-the-art technique for assessing the fault-detection capacity of a test suite. Unfortunately, mutation testing consumes enormous computing resources because it runs the whole test suite for each and every…

Binary code similarity comparison is a methodology for identifying similar or identical code fragments in binary programs. It is indispensable in fields of software engineering and security, which has many important applications (e.g.,…

Evaluating software engineering capabilities has become a core component of modern large language models (LLMs); however, the key bottleneck hindering further scaling lies not in the scarcity of high-quality solutions, but in the lack of…

Refactoring is an activity that improves the internal structure of the code without altering its external behavior. When performed on the production code, the tests can be used to verify that the external behavior of the production code is…

Binary code analysis plays a pivotal role in the field of software security and is widely used in tasks such as software maintenance, malware detection, software vulnerability discovery, patch analysis, etc. However, unlike source code,…

Binary code analysis allows analyzing binary code without having access to the corresponding source code. A binary, after disassembly, is expressed in an assembly language. This inspires us to approach binary analysis by leveraging ideas…

Model-based mutation analysis is a recent research area, and real-time system testing can benefit from using model mutants. Model-based mutation testing (MBMT) is a particular branch of model-based testing. It generates faulty versions of a…

As developers increasingly rely on LLM-generated code summaries for documentation, testing, and review, it is important to study whether these summaries accurately reflect what the program actually does. LLMs often produce confident…

In verification-aware languages, such as Dafny, despite their critical role, specifications are as prone to error as implementations. Flaws in specifications can result in formally verified programs that deviate from the intended behavior.…

Retrieving binary code via natural language queries is a pivotal capability for downstream tasks in the software security domain, such as vulnerability detection and malware analysis. However, it is challenging to identify binary functions…

We propose a new test case prioritization technique that combines both mutation-based and diversity-based approaches. Our diversity-aware mutation-based technique relies on the notion of mutant distinguishment, which aims to distinguish one…

Malware authors are continuously evolving their code base to include counter-analysis methods that can significantly hinder their detection and blocking. While the execution of malware in a sandboxed environment may provide a lot of…

Verification of microkernels, device drivers, and crypto routines requires analyses at the binary level. In order to automate these analyses, in the last years several binary analysis platforms have been introduced. These platforms share a…

Random testing has proven to be an effective technique for compiler validation. However, the debugging of bugs identified through random testing presents a significant challenge due to the frequent occurrence of duplicate test programs that…

The construction of computer models (mathematical models implemented in computer codes), with respect to observed phenomena, is usually undertaken by building different variants depending on modeller sensibility, and choosing the one…

Software code complexity is a well-studied property to determine software component health. However, the existing code complexity metrics do not directly take into account the fault-proneness aspect of the code. We propose a metric called…

In mutation testing, the quality of a test suite is evaluated by introducing faults into a program and determining whether the program's tests detect them. Most existing approaches for mutation testing involve the application of a fixed set…