Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Suitability Of Finite State Automata To Model String Constraints In Probablistic Symbolic Execution, Andrew Harris

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Probabilistic Symbolic Execution (PSE) extends Symbolic Execution (SE), a path-sensitive static program analysis technique, by calculating the probabilities with which program paths are executed. PSE relies on the ability of the underlying symbolic models to accurately represent the execution paths of the program as the collection of input values following these paths. While researchers established PSE for numerical data types, PSE for complex data types such as strings is a novel area of research.

For string data types SE tools commonly utilize finite state automata to represent a symbolic string model. Thus, PSE inherits from SE automata-based symbolic string models …