Slice-guided path exploration in symbolic execution

An application may be satisfiable which is designed for the new communication protocols and services in real-time, but there can be paths that could be exploited by the attackers. Testing is a process of executing a program with the intent of ensuring the quality and reliability of the applications. It aims to search for a set of test data to satisfy a certain standard of coverage. Symbolic execution and program slicing are two powerful techniques that can guide the testing team to analyze more desired paths. Symbolic execution is utilized to explore all of the execution paths without requiring concrete inputs. Program slicing is used to extract the statements of a program that are relevant to a given computation. However, the usage of symbolic execution is limited by the path explosion problem. Hence, in this paper, we combine symbolic execution and program slicing to overcome this drawback. Moreover, we introduce a method to eliminate redundant paths based on McCabe number and independent paths.