Discovering instructions for robust binary-level coverage criteria

Vaibhav Sharma, Taejoon Byun, Stephen McCamant, Sanjai Rayadurgam, Mats P.E. Heimdahl

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Object-Branch Coverage (OBC) is often used to measure effective-ness of test suites, when source code is unavailable. The traditional OBC definition can be made more resilient to variations in compilers and the structure of generated code by creating more robust definitions. However finding which instructions should be included in each new definition is laborious, error-prone, and architecture-dependent. We automate the discovery of instructions to be included for an improved OBC definition on the X86 and ARM architectures. We discover all possible valid instructions by symbolically executing instruction decoders for X86 and ARM instructions. For each discovered instruction, we translate it to Vine IR, and check if the Vine IR translation satisfies the OBC definition. We verify the correctness of our tool by comparing its output with the X86 and ARM architecture manuals. Our automated instruction clas-sification facilitates development of more robust OBC definitions with better bug-finding ability and lesser sensitivity to compiler variations.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationTECPS 2017 - Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGSOFT International Workshop on Testing Embedded and Cyber-Physical Systems, co-located with ISSTA 2017
EditorsTingting Yu, Darko Marinov
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages1-4
Number of pages4
ISBN (Electronic)9781450351126
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 13 2017
Event1st ACM SIGSOFT International Workshop on Testing Embedded and Cyber-Physical Systems, TECPS 2017 - Santa Barbara, United States
Duration: Jul 13 2017 → …

Publication series

NameTECPS 2017 - Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGSOFT International Workshop on Testing Embedded and Cyber-Physical Systems, co-located with ISSTA 2017

Other

Other1st ACM SIGSOFT International Workshop on Testing Embedded and Cyber-Physical Systems, TECPS 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySanta Barbara
Period7/13/17 → …

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Numbers 1563920 and 1514444. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. The authors wish to thank Qiuchen Yan for help with enumeration of X86 instructions.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Association for Computing Machinery.

Keywords

  • Instruction classification
  • Object branch coverage

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