Automated Capturing and Replaying Unit Inputs of C Programs from System Executions through Static and Dynamic Analysis

Hyunsu Lim, Yunho Kim, Moonzoo Kim

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2018.45.10.1035

Despite the high testing power of unit testing, it has an infeasible input problem, which is an impossible input for a unit in a real system. There is a technique known as Carving and Replay (CR) that serializes the state of the program when a target function is called in system execution and uses it as unit test case by deserializing it, to solve this infeasible input problem. However, unlike programming languages like Java, the C programming language does not provide a serialization method. Also, because of the C programming language’s features such as structure, union, and pointer, it has its own challenges for applying the CR technique. In this paper, we examine the challenges and suggest a CR tool for C programs by solving such problems with tracking the memory usage of the program, using run-time information from dynamic analysis, and inserting a probe code by static analysis.