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Felici_2024_Spri_EmpSoftEng
Journal article

HyperPUT : generating synthetic faulty programs to challenge bug-finding tools

  • Felici, Riccardo Istituto di sistemi informatici (SYS), Facoltà di scienze informatiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
  • Pozzi, Laura Istituto di sistemi informatici (SYS), Facoltà di scienze informatiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
  • Furia, Carlo Alberto ORCID Istituto del software (SI), Facoltà di scienze informatiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
  • 2024
Published in:
  • Empirical software engineering. - 2024, vol. 29, no. 38
Program generation
Testing benchmarks
Synthetic bug injection
Testing frameworks
Fuzzing
Symbolic execution
English As research in automatically detecting bugs grows and produces new techniques, having suitable collections of programs with known bugs becomes crucial to reliably and meaningfully compare the effectiveness of these techniques. Most of the existing approaches rely on benchmarks collecting manually curated real-world bugs, or synthetic bugs seeded into real-world programs. Using real-world programs entails that extending the existing benchmarks or creating new ones remains a complex time-consuming task. In this paper, we propose a complementary approach that automatically generates programs with seeded bugs. Our technique, called HyperPUT, builds C programs from a “seed” bug by incrementally applying program transformations (introducing programming constructs such as conditionals, loops, etc.) until a program of the desired size is generated. In our experimental evaluation, we demonstrate how HyperPUT can generate buggy programs that can challenge in different ways the capabilities of modern bug-finding tools, and some of whose characteristics are comparable to those of bugs in existing benchmarks. These results suggest that HyperPUT can be a useful tool to support further research in bug-finding techniques—in particular their empirical evaluation.
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Language
  • English
Classification
Computer science and technology
License
CC BY
Open access status
hybrid
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://n2t.net/ark:/12658/srd1327320
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