The Symbolic Execution Debugger (SED): a platform for interactive symbolic execution, debugging, verification and more

摘要

The Symbolic Execution Debugger (SED), is an extension of the debug platform for interactive debuggers based on symbolic execution. The SED comes with a static symbolic execution engine for sequential programs, but any third-party symbolic execution engine can be integrated into the SED. An interactive debugger based on symbolic execution allows one like a traditional debugger to locate defects in the source code. The difference is that all feasible execution paths are explored at once, and thus there is no need to know input values resulting in an execution that exhibits the failure. In addition, such a debugger can be used in code reviews and to guide and present results of an analysis based on symbolic execution such as, in our case, correctness proofs. Experimental evaluations proved that the SED increases the effectiveness of code reviews and proof understanding tasks.