Paper Info
Title
Modified condition/decision coverage (MC/DC) oriented compiler optimization for symbolic execution
Abstract
Symbolic execution is an effective way of systematically exploring the search space of a program, and is often used for automatic software testing and bug finding. The program to be analyzed is usually compiled into a binary or an intermediate representation, on which symbolic execution is carried out. During this process, compiler optimizations influence the effectiveness and efficiency of symbolic execution. However, to the best of our knowledge, there exists no work on compiler optimization recommendation for symbolic execution with respect to (w.r.t.) modified condition/decision coverage (MC/DC), which is an important testing coverage criterion widely used for mission-critical software. This study describes our use of a state-of-the-art symbolic execution tool to carry out extensive experiments to study the impact of compiler optimizations on symbolic execution w.r.t. MC/DC. The results indicate that instruction combining (IC) optimization is the important and dominant optimization for symbolic execution w.r.t. MC/DC. We designed and implemented a support vector machine based optimization recommendation method w.r.t. IC (denoted as auto). The experiments on two standard benchmarks (Coreutils and NECLA) showed that auto achieves the best MC/DC on 67.47% of Coreutils programs and 78.26% of NECLA programs.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1631/FITEE.1900213
FRONTIERS OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY & ELECTRONIC ENGINEERING
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Compiler optimization,Modified condition,decision coverage (MC/DC),Optimization recommendation,Symbolic execution
Journal
21.0
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
9.0
2095-9184
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Wei-jiang Hong100.34
Yi-jun Liu200.34
Zhenbang Chen319923.60
Xian Zhang411218.22
Ji Wang519036.75