Characterizing program behavior carries significant value in various avenues of computer engineering research from investigation of future architectures tailored better for emerging applications to OS based dynamic management techniques. Most modern applications exhibit distinctively different behavior throughout their runtimes, which constitute several phases of execution that share a greater ...

A dynamic program slice is this part of a program that "affects" the computation of a variable of interest during program execution on a specific program input. Dynamic program slicing refers to a collection of program slicing methods that are based on program execution and may significantly reduce the size of a program slice because run-time information, collected during program execution, is ...

Execution Shadow processing was motivated, in part, by a tool called AE that supports abstract execution [17]. AE is used for efficient generation of detailed program traces. A source program, in C, is instrumented to record a small set of key events during execution. After execution these events serve as input to an abstract version of the original program that can recreate a full trace of the...

Security testing has gained significant attention recently due to the huge number of attacks against software systems. This paper presents a novel security testing method using trace-based symbolic execution and satisfiability analysis. It reuses test cases generated from traditional functional testing to produce execution traces. An execution trace is a sequence of program statements exercised...

Performance becomes an issue particularly when execution cost hinders the functionality of a program. Typically a profiler can be used to find program code execution which represents a large portion of the overall execution cost of a program. Pinpointing where a performance issue exists provides a starting point for tracing cause back through a program. While profiling shows where a performance...

The execution behavior of a program component is defined as the sequence of values produced at the component during program execution. This paper presents an efficient algorithm for detecting program components − in one or more programs − that exhibit identical execution behaviors. The algorithm operates on a new graph representation for programs that combines features of static-single-assignme...

Symbolic execution is a classical program analysis technique, widely used for program testing and bug finding. In this work we generalize symbolic execution to support program analysis for relational properties, namely properties about two programs, or about two executions of a single program on different inputs. We design a relational symbolic execution engine, named RelSym, which supports tes...