English
Related papers

Related papers: Guiding Symbolic Execution with Static Analysis an…

200 papers

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate requirements specifications, design documents, code, and test cases. In contrast, much less attention has been given to a more difficult assurance problem: statically verifying…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zhi Quan Zhou , Dave Towey , Tsong Yueh Chen

In this paper, we present the first comprehensive empirical study of specialized LLM-based detectors and compare them with traditional static analyzers at the project scale. Specifically, our study evaluates five latest and representative…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Fengjie Li , Jiajun Jiang , Dongchi Chen , Yingfei Xiong

Static analysis, the process of examining code without executing it, is crucial for identifying software issues. Yet, static analysis is hampered by its complexity and the need for customization for different targets. Traditional static…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-12-15 Yu Hao , Weiteng Chen , Ziqiao Zhou , Weidong Cui

The security development lifecycle (SDL) is becoming an industry standard. Dynamic symbolic execution (DSE) has enormous amount of applications in computer security (fuzzing, vulnerability discovery, reverse-engineering, etc.). We propose…

Symbolic execution is a powerful technique for bug finding and program testing. It is successful in finding bugs in real-world code. The core reasoning techniques use constraint solving, path exploration, and search, which are also the same…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-07-20 Sahil Verma , Roland H. C. Yap

Symbolic Execution is a formal method that can be used to verify the behavior of computer programs and detect software vulnerabilities. Compared to other testing methods such as fuzzing, Symbolic Execution has the advantage of providing…

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

Symbolic analysis of security exploits in smart contracts has demonstrated to be valuable for analyzing predefined vulnerability properties. While some symbolic tools perform complex analysis steps, they require a predetermined invocation…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Wesley Joon-Wie Tann , Xing Jie Han , Sourav Sen Gupta , Yew-Soon Ong

In this work, we present MoCQ, a neuro-symbolic static analysis framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to automatically generate vulnerability detection patterns. This approach combines the precision and scalability of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Penghui Li , Songchen Yao , Josef Sarfati Korich , Changhua Luo , Jianjia Yu , Yinzhi Cao , Junfeng Yang

Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tools are integral to modern DevSecOps pipelines, yet tools like CodeQL, Semgrep, and SonarQube remain fundamentally constrained: they require expert-crafted queries, generate excessive false…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-11 George Tsigkourakos , Constantinos Patsakis

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

WebAssembly (Wasm), as a compact, fast, and isolation-guaranteed binary format, can be compiled from more than 40 high-level programming languages. However, vulnerabilities in Wasm binaries could lead to sensitive data leakage and even…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-08-19 Ningyu He , Zhehao Zhao , Hanqin Guan , Jikai Wang , Shuo Peng , Ding Li , Haoyu Wang , Xiangqun Chen , Yao Guo

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

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

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

Symbolic execution is a technique which enables automatically generating test inputs (and outputs) exercising a set of execution paths within a program to be tested. If the paths cover a sufficient part of the code under test, the test data…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2015-01-22 Michaël Marcozzi , Wim Vanhoof , Jean-Luc Hainaut

The performance of large language model (LLM) agents depends critically on the execution harness, the system layer that orchestrates tool use, context management, and state persistence. Yet this same architectural centrality makes the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Xixun Lin , Yang Liu , Yancheng Chen , Yongxuan Wu , Yucheng Ning , Yilong Liu , Nan Sun , Shun Zhang , Bin Chong , Chuan Zhou , Yanan Cao

While static analysis is useful in detecting early-stage hardware security bugs, its efficacy is limited because it requires information to form checks and is often unable to explain the security impact of a detected vulnerability. Large…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-01 Baleegh Ahmad , Hammond Pearce , Ramesh Karri , Benjamin Tan

Executing code is essential for various program analysis tasks, e.g., to detect bugs that manifest through exceptions or to obtain execution traces for further dynamic analysis. However, executing an arbitrary piece of code is often…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-11-13 Beatriz Souza , Michael Pradel

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) remain highly vulnerable to textual and visual jailbreaks, as well as prompt injections (arXiv:2307.15043, Greshake et al., 2023, arXiv:2306.13213). Existing defenses often…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Guy Azov , Ofer Rivlin , Guy Shtar