Mining patterns of unsatisfiable constraints to detect infeasible paths

• Main Authors: DING, Sun, TAN, Hee Beng Kuan, SHAR, Lwin Khin
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2015
• Subjects: Infeasible paths; pattern mining; symbolic evaluation; static analysis; structural testing; Databases and Information Systems; Data Storage Systems
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4779; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5782/viewcontent/Mining_Patterns_of_Unsatisfiable_Constraints_to_Detect_Infeasible_Paths_AST15.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Detection of infeasible paths is required in many areas including test coverage analysis, test case generation, security vulnerability analysis, etc. Existing approaches typically use static analysis coupled with symbolic evaluation, heuristics, or path-pattern analysis. This paper is related to these approaches but with a different objective. It is to analyze code of real systems to build patterns of unsatisfiable constraints in infeasible paths. The resulting patterns can be used to detect infeasible paths without the use of constraint solver and evaluation of function calls involved, thus improving scalability. The patterns can be built gradually. Evaluation of the proposed approach shows promising results.