Symbolic Execution and Constraint Solving (Dagstuhl Seminar 14442)

Abstract

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 14442 "Symbolic Execution and Constraint Solving", whose main goals were to bring together leading researchers in the fields of symbolic execution and constraint solving, foster greater communication between these two communities and exchange ideas about new research directions in these fields. There has been a veritable revolution over the last decade in the symbiotic fields of constraint solving and symbolic execution. Even though key ideas behind symbolic execution were introduced more than three decades ago, it was only recently that these techniques became practical as a result of significant advances in constraint satisfiability and scalable combinations of concrete and symbolic execution. Thanks to these advances, testing and analysis techniques based on symbolic execution are having a major impact on many sub-fields of software engineering, computer systems, security, and others. New applications such as program and document repair are being enabled, while older applications such as model checking are being super-charged. Additionally, significant and fast-paced advances are being made in research at the intersection of traditional program analysis, symbolic execution and constraint solving. Therefore, this seminar brought together researchers in these varied fields in order to further facilitate collaborations that take advantage of this unique and fruitful confluence of ideas from the fields of symbolic execution and constraint solving