Dynamic Symbolic Execution

Dynamic symbolic execution has gathered a lot of attention in recent years as an effective technique for generating high-coverage test suites and finding deep errors in complex software applications.  In this tutorial, I will discuss the main challenges of symbolic execution in terms of path exploration and constraint solving, and our experience applying this technique in several different contexts, including bug finding, attack generation, patch testing and bounded verification.

Cristian Cadar is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, where he leads the Software Reliability Group.  His research interests span the areas of software engineering, computer systems and security, with an emphasis on building practical tools for improving the reliability and security of software systems. Cristian received a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University, and undergraduate and Master’s degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.