Marco: A stochastic asynchronous concolic explorer

• Main Authors: HU, Jie, DUAN, Yue, YIN, Heng
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2024
• Subjects: Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8720; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/9723/viewcontent/Marco_icse24_pv.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Concolic execution is a powerful program analysis technique for code path exploration. Despite recent advances that greatly improved the efficiency of concolic execution engines, path constraint solving remains a major bottleneck of concolic testing. An intelligent scheduler for inputs/branches becomes even more crucial. Our studies show that the previously under-studied branch-flipping policy adopted by state-of-the-art concolic execution engines has several limitations. We propose to assess each branch by its potential for new code coverage from a global view, concerning the path divergence probability at each branch. To validate this idea, we implemented a prototype Marco and evaluated it against the state-of-the-art concolic executor on 30 real-world programs from Google’s Fuzzbench, Binutils, and UniBench. The result shows that Marco can outperform the baseline approach and make continuous progress after the baseline approach terminates.