Title
REINAM - reinforcement learning for input-grammar inference.
Abstract
Program input grammars (i.e., grammars encoding the language of valid program inputs) facilitate a wide range of applications in software engineering such as symbolic execution and delta debugging. Grammars synthesized by existing approaches can cover only a small part of the valid input space mainly due to unanalyzable code (e.g., native code) in programs and lacking high-quality and high-variety seed inputs. To address these challenges, we present REINAM, a reinforcement-learning approach for synthesizing probabilistic context-free program input grammars without any seed inputs. REINAM uses an industrial symbolic execution engine to generate an initial set of inputs for the given target program, and then uses an iterative process of grammar generalization to proactively generate additional inputs to infer grammars generalized from these initial seed inputs. To efficiently search for target generalizations in a huge search space of candidate generalization operators, REINAM includes a novel formulation of the search problem as a reinforcement learning problem. Our evaluation on eleven real-world benchmarks shows that REINAM outperforms an existing state-of-the-art approach on precision and recall of synthesized grammars, and fuzz testing based on REINAM substantially increases the coverage of the space of valid inputs. REINAM is able to synthesize a grammar covering the entire valid input space for some benchmarks without decreasing the accuracy of the grammar.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3338906.3338958
ESEC/SIGSOFT FSE
Keywords
Field
DocType
reinforcement learning,grammar synthesis,dynamic symbolic execution,fuzzing
Fuzz testing,Computer science,Theoretical computer science,Grammar inference,Artificial intelligence,Reinforcement learning
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-5572-8
1
0.39
References 
Authors
0
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zhengkai Wu1141.75
Evan Johnson210.39
Wei Yang343720.57
Bastani, Osbert4646.14
Dawn Song57334385.37
Peng, Jian643050.07
Tao Xie75978304.97