Concolic testing of the multi-sector read operation for flash storage platform software

Abstract

Abstract. In today's information society, flash memory has become a virtually indispensable component, particularly for mobile devices. In order for mobile devices to operate successfully, it is essential that flash memory be controlled correctly through file system software. However, as is typical for embedded software, conventional testing methods often fail to detect hidden flaws in the software due to the difficulty of creating effective test cases. As a different approach, model checking techniques guarantee a complete analysis, but only on a limited scale. In this paper, we describe an empirical study wherein a concolic testing method is applied to the multi-sector read operation for a flash memory. This method combines a symbolic static analysis and a concrete dynamic analysis to automatically generate test cases and perform exhaustive path testing accordingly. In addition, we analyze the advantages and weaknesses of the concolic testing approach on the domain of the flash file system compared to model checking techniques.

Increase in Modified Condition/Decision Coverage using program code transformer

“…Moonzoo Kim et al [9] says the technique combines a concrete dynamic execution and a symbolic execution to automatically generate test cases for path coverage is known as concolic testing. In our approach we will use concolic tester CREST [1] an open source concolic testing tool for C code structures.…”

Industrial Application of Concolic Testing on Embedded Software: Case Studies

“…In contrast, CREST inserts probes in a target program to record symbolic path formulas at runtime and uses a linear integer arithmetic SMT solver, which achieves faster testing speed compared to KLEE. Last, we had rich experience with CREST in other industrial case studies [17], [21], [18].…”

“…Concolic testing has been applied to detect bugs in various target applications such as database applications [12], [26], web application servers [3], [31], web application client [16], source code control client [24], mobile sensor network [30], network card device driver [8], and flash memory storage platform [18].…”

Industrial application of concolic testing approach: A case study on libexif by using CREST-BV and KLEE

“…Concolic testing has been applied to detect bugs in various applications such as sensor networks [24], web applications [2], database applications [8], [21], embedded systems [14], [15], linux command-line applications [16], [15], etc. However, most related case studies concentrate on the evaluation of the authors' own techniques and do not describe the detailed user efforts and difficulties to apply concolic testing to real world applications.…”