What is symbolic execution?
In computer science, symbolic execution (also symbolic evaluation or symbex) is a means of analyzing a program to determine what inputs cause each part of a program to execute. Finally, the possible inputs that trigger a branch can be determined by solving the constraints.
What is a symbolic execution engine?
A symbolic execution engine will typically represent the program’s memory in an engine-specific data structure and, when the execution reaches a branch whose condition in- volves symbolic values, the engine forks the program state, such that each path has its private version of the program state.
What is a symbolic execution tree?
Formally, a symbolic execution tree SYM ( P ) of a program P , is a (possibly infinite) tree where nodes are symbolic states of the program and arcs are possible state transitions.
What is dynamic symbolic execution?
Dynamic symbolic execution is a hybrid approach to software testing that attempts to strike a balance between the costs and benefits of dynamic and static analysis. As you saw, it generates concrete inputs one-by-one such that each input takes a different path through the program’s computation tree.
What is execution path of a program?
An execution path is a possible flow of control of a program. Each execution path maintains and updates mapping from variables to symbolic expressions during symbolic execution. Control flow statements such as if makes a current execution path diverge into two different execution paths.
Is symbolic execution sound and complete?
From a theoretical perspective, exhaustive symbolic execution provides a sound and complete methodology for any decidable analysis.
How do you use symbolic execution?
Steps to use Symbolic Execution: In symbolic execution, the data is replaced by symbolic values with set of expressions, one expression per output variable. The common approach for symbolic execution is to perform an analysis of the program, resulting in the creation of a flow graph.
Is Symbolic execution static analysis?
Symbolic execution may be used just to show an expected symbolic result of a computation. That isn’t static analysis by the above definition because there isn’t any opinion formed about how good that result is. Or, the formula may be subjected to analysis, at which point it becomes part of a static analysis.
Is symbolic execution static analysis?
Is execution a Concolic sound?
The “concolic testing” article you’ve linked to suggests a hybrid approach between testing on specific inputs (concrete execution, which is complete but unsound) and symbolic testing (symbolic execution, which sound but incomplete).
Is symbolic execution sound?
What is concrete execution?
From what I have understood, “concrete execution” means “the execution of a program with actual input values unlike symbolic execution, which assumes symbolic values to variables, inputs etc.”.