19,206 research outputs found
Cause Clue Clauses: Error Localization using Maximum Satisfiability
Much effort is spent everyday by programmers in trying to reduce long,
failing execution traces to the cause of the error. We present a new algorithm
for error cause localization based on a reduction to the maximal satisfiability
problem (MAX-SAT), which asks what is the maximum number of clauses of a
Boolean formula that can be simultaneously satisfied by an assignment. At an
intuitive level, our algorithm takes as input a program and a failing test, and
comprises the following three steps. First, using symbolic execution, we encode
a trace of a program as a Boolean trace formula which is satisfiable iff the
trace is feasible. Second, for a failing program execution (e.g., one that
violates an assertion or a post-condition), we construct an unsatisfiable
formula by taking the trace formula and additionally asserting that the input
is the failing test and that the assertion condition does hold at the end.
Third, using MAX-SAT, we find a maximal set of clauses in this formula that can
be satisfied together, and output the complement set as a potential cause of
the error. We have implemented our algorithm in a tool called bug-assist for C
programs. We demonstrate the surprising effectiveness of the tool on a set of
benchmark examples with injected faults, and show that in most cases,
bug-assist can quickly and precisely isolate the exact few lines of code whose
change eliminates the error. We also demonstrate how our algorithm can be
modified to automatically suggest fixes for common classes of errors such as
off-by-one.Comment: The pre-alpha version of the tool can be downloaded from
http://bugassist.mpi-sws.or
Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications
Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for
the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research
experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts
today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited
abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes,
thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led
to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at
formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism
are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of
clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN)
paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right
kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence
in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and
synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a
self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in
formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial
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