Looking Closer at Compositional Symbolic Execution

Abstract

Compositional symbolic execution has been proposed as a way to increase the efficience of symbolic execution. Essentially, when a function is symbolically executed, a summary of the path that was executed is stored. This summary records the precondition and postcondition of the path, and on subsequent calls that satisfy that precondition, the corresponding postcondition can be returned instead of executing the function again. On a closer look at this technique, we generalise the idea by allowing summaries to describe any arbitrary code fragments, in order to further extend its potential. In our research, we explore the use of fine-grained summaries, in which blocks within functions are summa..