Answer Set Planning Under Action Costs

Recently, planning based on answer set programming has been proposed as an approach towards realizing declarative planning systems. In this paper, we present the language Kc, which extends the declarative planning language K by action costs. Kc provides the notion of admissible and optimal plans, which are plans whose overall action costs are within a given limit resp. minimum over all plans (i.e., cheapest plans). As we demonstrate, this novel language allows for expressing some nontrivial planning tasks in a declarative way. Furthermore, it can be utilized for representing planning problems under other optimality criteria, such as computing ``shortest'' plans (with the least number of steps), and refinement combinations of cheapest and fastest plans. We study complexity aspects of the language Kc and provide a transformation to logic programs, such that planning problems are solved via answer set programming. Furthermore, we report experimental results on selected problems. Our experience is encouraging that answer set planning may be a valuable approach to expressive planning systems in which intricate planning problems can be naturally specified and solved

Badger: Complexity Analysis with Fuzzing and Symbolic Execution

Hybrid testing approaches that involve fuzz testing and symbolic execution have shown promising results in achieving high code coverage, uncovering subtle errors and vulnerabilities in a variety of software applications. In this paper we describe Badger - a new hybrid approach for complexity analysis, with the goal of discovering vulnerabilities which occur when the worst-case time or space complexity of an application is significantly higher than the average case. Badger uses fuzz testing to generate a diverse set of inputs that aim to increase not only coverage but also a resource-related cost associated with each path. Since fuzzing may fail to execute deep program paths due to its limited knowledge about the conditions that influence these paths, we complement the analysis with a symbolic execution, which is also customized to search for paths that increase the resource-related cost. Symbolic execution is particularly good at generating inputs that satisfy various program conditions but by itself suffers from path explosion. Therefore, Badger uses fuzzing and symbolic execution in tandem, to leverage their benefits and overcome their weaknesses. We implemented our approach for the analysis of Java programs, based on Kelinci and Symbolic PathFinder. We evaluated Badger on Java applications, showing that our approach is significantly faster in generating worst-case executions compared to fuzzing or symbolic execution on their own