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Modern software relies on a multitude of automated testing and quality assurance tools to prevent errors, bugs and potential vulnerabilities. This study sets out to provide a head-to-head, quantitative and qualitative evaluation of six…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Damian Gnieciak , Tomasz Szandala

Symbolic execution is a powerful verification tool for hardware designs, but suffers from the path explosion problem. We introduce a new approach, piecewise composition, which leverages the modular structure of hardware to transfer the work…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-04-13 Kaki Ryan , Cynthia Sturton

Symbolic execution is a classical program analysis technique used to show that programs satisfy or violate given specifications. In this work we generalize symbolic execution to support program analysis for relational specifications in the…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2019-08-05 Gian Pietro Farina , Stephen Chong , Marco Gaboardi

Static analysis is a method of analyzing source code without executing it. It is widely used to find bugs and code smells in industrial software. Besides other methods, the most important techniques are those based on the abstract syntax…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-08-13 Gabor Horvath , Reka Kovacs , Richard Szalay , Zoltan Porkolab

The emergence of vibe coding, a paradigm where non-technical users instruct Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate executable codes via natural language, presents both significant opportunities and severe risks for the construction…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-28 S M Jamil Uddin

Eliminating vulnerabilities from low-level code is vital for securing software. Static analysis is a promising approach for discovering vulnerabilities since it can provide developers early feedback on the code they write. But, it presents…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2016-04-07 Bhargava Shastry , Fabian Yamaguchi , Konrad Rieck , Jean-Pierre Seifert

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

Multiple successful compositional symbolic execution (CSE) tools and platforms exploit separation logic (SL) for compositional verification and/or incorrectness separation logic (ISL) for compositional bug-finding, including VeriFast,…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Andreas Lööw , Seung Hoon Park , Daniele Nantes-Sobrinho , Sacha-Élie Ayoun , Opale Sjöstedt , Philippa Gardner

Scientific software relies on high-precision computation, yet finite floating-point representations can introduce precision errors that propagate in safety-critical domains. Despite the growing use of large language models (LLMs) in…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Tien Nguyen , Kirshanthan Sundararajah , Muhammad Ali Gulzar

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked interest in their application to Static Application Security Testing (SAST), primarily due to their superior contextual reasoning capabilities compared to traditional symbolic…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Zi Liang , Qipeng Xie , Jun He , Bohuan Xue , Weizheng Wang , Yuandao Cai , Fei Luo , Boxian Zhang , Haibo Hu , Kaishun Wu

We define QSE, a symbolic execution framework for quantum programs by integrating symbolic variables into quantum states and the outcomes of quantum measurements. The soundness of QSE is established through a theorem that ensures the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-04-30 Wang Fang , Mingsheng Ying

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

Fuzz testing is one of the most effective techniques for finding software vulnerabilities. While modern fuzzers can generate inputs and monitor executions automatically, the overall workflow, from analyzing a codebase, to configuring…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Max Bazalii , Marius Fleischer

Since its major release in 2006, the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) has become the industry standard for interfacing a computer's hardware and operating system, replacing BIOS. UEFI has higher privileged security access to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-07-18 Md Shafiuzzaman , Achintya Desai , Laboni Sarker , Tevfik Bultan

In recent years, there has been significant progress in the development and industrial adoption of static analyzers. Such analyzers typically provide a large, if not huge, number of configurable options controlling the precision and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-10-01 Muhammad Numair Mansur , Benjamin Mariano , Maria Christakis , Jorge A. Navas , Valentin Wüstholz

Memory leaks remain prevalent in real-world C/C++ software. Static analyzers such as CodeQL provide scalable program analysis but frequently miss such bugs because they cannot recognize project-specific custom memory-management functions…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Huihui Huang , Jieke Shi , Bo Wang , Zhou Yang , David Lo

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

The weaponization of LLMs for automated malware generation poses an existential threat to conventional detection paradigms. AI-generated malware exhibits polymorphic, metamorphic, and context-aware evasion capabilities that render…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-11 George Edwards , Mahdi Eslamimehr

Static program analysis plays an essential role in program optimization, bug detection, and debugging. However, reliance on compilation and limited customization hinder its adoption in the real world. This paper presents a compositional…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Chengpeng Wang , Yifei Gao , Wuqi Zhang , Xuwei Liu , Jinyao Guo , Mingwei Zheng , Qingkai Shi , Xiangyu Zhang

In this paper, we present a challenging code reasoning task: vulnerability detection. Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in natural-language and math reasoning, but state-of-the-art (SOTA) models reported only 54.5%…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Benjamin Steenhoek , Md Mahbubur Rahman , Monoshi Kumar Roy , Mirza Sanjida Alam , Hengbo Tong , Swarna Das , Earl T. Barr , Wei Le