PASDA: A Partition-based Semantic Differencing Approach with Best Effort Classification of Undecided Cases

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Hauptverfasser: Glock, Johann, Pichler, Josef, Pinzger, Martin
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Glock, Johann
Pichler, Josef
Pinzger, Martin
author_facet Glock, Johann
Pichler, Josef
Pinzger, Martin
contents Equivalence checking is used to verify whether two programs produce equivalent outputs when given equivalent inputs. Research in this field mainly focused on improving equivalence checking accuracy and runtime performance. However, for program pairs that cannot be proven to be either equivalent or non-equivalent, existing approaches only report a classification result of "unknown", which provides no information regarding the programs' non-/equivalence. In this paper, we introduce PASDA, our partition-based semantic differencing approach with best effort classification of undecided cases. While PASDA aims to formally prove non-/equivalence of analyzed program pairs using a variant of differential symbolic execution, its main novelty lies in its handling of cases for which no formal non-/equivalence proof can be found. For such cases, PASDA provides a best effort equivalence classification based on a set of classification heuristics. We evaluated PASDA with an existing benchmark consisting of 141 non-/equivalent program pairs. PASDA correctly classified 61-74% of these cases at timeouts from 10 seconds to 3600 seconds. Thus, PASDA achieved equivalence checking accuracies that are 3-7% higher than the best results achieved by three existing tools. Furthermore, PASDA's best effort classifications were correct for 70-75% of equivalent and 55-85% of non-equivalent cases across the different timeouts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_08071
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PASDA: A Partition-based Semantic Differencing Approach with Best Effort Classification of Undecided Cases
Glock, Johann
Pichler, Josef
Pinzger, Martin
Software Engineering
Equivalence checking is used to verify whether two programs produce equivalent outputs when given equivalent inputs. Research in this field mainly focused on improving equivalence checking accuracy and runtime performance. However, for program pairs that cannot be proven to be either equivalent or non-equivalent, existing approaches only report a classification result of "unknown", which provides no information regarding the programs' non-/equivalence. In this paper, we introduce PASDA, our partition-based semantic differencing approach with best effort classification of undecided cases. While PASDA aims to formally prove non-/equivalence of analyzed program pairs using a variant of differential symbolic execution, its main novelty lies in its handling of cases for which no formal non-/equivalence proof can be found. For such cases, PASDA provides a best effort equivalence classification based on a set of classification heuristics. We evaluated PASDA with an existing benchmark consisting of 141 non-/equivalent program pairs. PASDA correctly classified 61-74% of these cases at timeouts from 10 seconds to 3600 seconds. Thus, PASDA achieved equivalence checking accuracies that are 3-7% higher than the best results achieved by three existing tools. Furthermore, PASDA's best effort classifications were correct for 70-75% of equivalent and 55-85% of non-equivalent cases across the different timeouts.
title PASDA: A Partition-based Semantic Differencing Approach with Best Effort Classification of Undecided Cases
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.08071