Weak-Assert: A Weakness-Oriented Assertion Recommendation Toolkit for Program Analysis
Sponsor
SIGSOFT ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering IEEE-CS Computer Society
Published In
ICSE '18 Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings
Document Type
Citation
Publication Date
5-27-2018
Abstract
Assertions are helpful in program analysis, such as software testing and verification. The most challenging part of automatically recommending assertions is to design the assertion patterns and to insert assertions in proper locations. In this paper, we develop Weak-Assert1, a weakness-oriented assertion recommendation toolkit for program analysis of C code. A weakness-oriented assertion is an assertion which can help to find potential program weaknesses. Weak-Assert uses well-designed patterns to match the abstract syntax trees of source code automatically. It collects significant messages from trees and inserts assertions into proper locations of programs. These assertions can be checked by using program analysis techniques. The experiments are set up on Juliet test suite and several actual projects in Github. Experimental results show that Weak-Assert helps to find 125 program weaknesses in 26 actual projects. These weaknesses are confirmed manually to be triggered by some test cases.
Locate the Document
DOI
10.1145/3183440.3183471
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/27626
Citation Details
Wang, C., Jiang, Y., Zhao, X., Song, X., Gu, M., & Sun, J. (2018, May). Weak-assert: a weakness-oriented assertion recommendation toolkit for program analysis. In Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceeedings (pp. 69-72). ACM.