Strongest postcondition semantics as the formal basis for reverse engineering

Gannod, Gerald C.; Cheng, Betty H. C.

doi:10.1007/bf00126962

Cited by 28 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…At this level, it is envisioned that more domain-speci c information will be incorporated in determining reuse. In order to facilitate the construction of speci cations of reusable components, complementary investigations are being pursued in reverse engineering in order to abstract formal speci cations from existing software 44,45,46] and in the area of formal construction of speci cations from requirements models 47,48].…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reusing analogous components

Cheng

Jeng

1997

IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.

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Using formal speci cations to represent software components facilitates the determination of reusability because they more precisely characterize the functionality of the software, and the well-de ned syntax makes processing amenable to automation. This paper presents an approach, based on formal methods, to the search, retrieval, and modi cation of reusable software components. From a two-tiered hierarchy of reusable software components, the existing components that are analogous to the query speci cation are retrieved from the hierarchy. The speci cation for an analogous retrieved component is compared to the query speci cation to determine what changes need to be applied to the corresponding program component in order to make it satisfy the query speci cation. This paper also describes an approach for assisting the modi cation of analogous components and gives an example to demonstrate its use.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reusing analogous components

Cheng

Jeng

1997

IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.

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“…The use of strongest postcondition calculus is not as popular as the wp calculus. A study is presented in [11] as a basis for formal reverse engineering for an imperative language. Our work is close to [9] in the sense of the use of static semantics to analyze bytecode.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a General Framework for Formal Reasoning about Java Bytecode Transformation

Lounas

Mezghiche

Lanet

2013

Electron. Proc. Theor. Comput. Sci.

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Program transformation has gained a wide interest since it is used for several purposes: altering semantics of a program, adding features to a program or performing optimizations. In this paper we focus on program transformations at the bytecode level. Because these transformations may introduce errors, our goal is to provide a formal way to verify the update and establish its correctness. The formal framework presented includes a definition of a formal semantics of updates which is the base of a static verification and a scheme based on Hoare triples and weakest precondition calculus to reason about behavioral aspects in bytecode transformatio

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“…For reverse engineering, Gannod and Cheng [15] proposed to infer detailed specifications statically by computing the strongest postconditions. Nevertheless, pre/postconditions obtained from analyzing the implementation are usually too detailed to understand and too specific to support program evolution.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

DySy

Csallner

Tillmann

Smaragdakis

2008

Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Software Engineering - ICSE '08

123

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Dynamically discovering likely program invariants from concrete test executions has emerged as a highly promising software engineering technique. Dynamic invariant inference has the advantage of succinctly summarizing both "expected" program inputs and the subset of program behaviors that is normal under those inputs. In this paper, we introduce a technique that can drastically increase the relevance of inferred invariants, or reduce the size of the test suite required to obtain good invariants. Instead of falsifying invariants produced by pre-set patterns, we determine likely program invariants by combining the concrete execution of actual test cases with a simultaneous symbolic execution of the same tests. The symbolic execution produces abstract conditions over program variables that the concrete tests satisfy during their execution. In this way, we obtain the benefits of dynamic inference tools like Daikon: the inferred invariants correspond to the observed program behaviors. At the same time, however, our inferred invariants are much more suited to the program at hand than Daikon's hardcoded invariant patterns. The symbolic invariants are literally derived from the program text itself, with appropriate value substitutions as dictated by symbolic execution.We implemented our technique in the DySy tool, which utilizes a powerful symbolic execution and simplification engine. The results confirm the benefits of our approach. In Daikon's prime example benchmark, we infer the majority of the interesting Daikon invariants, while eliminating invariants that a human user is likely to consider irrelevant.

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Strongest postcondition semantics as the formal basis for reverse engineering

Cited by 28 publications

References 17 publications

Reusing analogous components

Reusing analogous components

Towards a General Framework for Formal Reasoning about Java Bytecode Transformation

DySy

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