Concolic testing

Abstract

Concolic testing automates test input generation by combining the concrete and symbolic (concolic) execution of the code under test. Traditional test input generation techniques use either (1) concrete execution or (2) symbolic execution that builds constraints and is followed by a generation of concrete test inputs from these constraints. In contrast, concolic testing tightly couples both concrete and symbolic executions: they run simultaneously, and each gets feedback from the other. We have implemented concolic testing in tools for testing both C and Java programs. We have used the tools to find bugs in several real-world software systems including SGLIB, a popular C data structure library used in a commercial tool, a third-party implementation of the Needham-Schroeder protocol and the TMN protocol, the scheduler of Honeywell's DEOS real-time operating system, and the Sun Microsystems' JDK 1.4 collection framework. In this tutorial, we will describe concolic testing and some of its recent extensions