SEVE: Symbolic Execution based Vulnerability Exploring system

Purpose – Software vulnerabilities have been the greatest threat to the software industry for a long time. Many detection techniques have been developed to address this kind of issue, such as Fuzzing, but mere Fuzz Testing is not good enough, because the Fuzzing only alters the input of program randomly, and does not consider the basic semantics of the target software. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new vulnerability exploring system, called “SEVE” to explore the target software more deeply and to generate more test cases with more accuracy.Design/methodology/approach – Symbolic execution is the core technique of SEVE. The user can just input a standard input, and the SEVE system will record the execution path, alter the critical branches of it, and generate a totally different test case which will make the software under test execute a different path. In this way, some potential bugs or defects, even the exploitable vulnerabilities will be discovered. To alleviate path explosion, the authors...