Visible to the public Dynamic Tainting for Automatic Test Case Generation

TitleDynamic Tainting for Automatic Test Case Generation
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2017
AuthorsMathis, Björn
Conference NameProceedings of the 26th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis
PublisherACM
Conference LocationNew York, NY, USA
ISBN Number978-1-4503-5076-1
Keywordscomposability, dynamic tainting, Input Generation, Metrics, pubcrawl, taint analysis
AbstractDynamic tainting is an important part of modern software engineering research. State-of-the-art tools for debugging, bug detection and program analysis make use of this technique. Nonetheless, the research area based on dynamic tainting still has open questions, among others the automatic generation of program inputs. My proposed work concentrates on the use of dynamic tainting for test case generation. The goal is the generation of complex and valid test inputs from scratch. Therefore, I use byte level taint information enhanced with additional static and dynamic program analysis. This information is used in an evolutionary algorithm to create new offsprings and mutations. Concretely, instead of crossing and mutating the whole input randomly, taint information can be used to define which parts of the input have to be mutated. Furthermore, the taint information may also be used to define evolutionary operators. Eventually, the evolutionary algorithm is able to generate valid inputs for a program. Such inputs can be used together with the taint information for further program analysis, e.g. the generation of input grammars.
URLhttp://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3092703.3098233
DOI10.1145/3092703.3098233
Citation Keymathis_dynamic_2017