-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 350
JPF and Google Summer of Code 2017 Project Ideas
Please note that this list is not exclusive. If you have other ideas and topics related to JPF, please let us know on <jpf.gsoc [at] gmail.com> or the JPF Google group.
-
Increasing SPF Performance with Bounded Static Symbolic Execution
-
Verification and Testing Heap-based Programs with Symbolic PathFinder
The goal of this project is to improve the JPF build system. Currently, JPF uses Ant, and this project includes changing the JPF build system to sbt. This also includes bringing the configuration mechanism of JPF under sbt. Currently, the configuration mechanism is part of the core of JPF, jpf-core. The goal is to make this functionally as part of the build system.
JPF is able to find notorious concurrency bugs such as deadlocks. Although finding bugs is one of the major strengths of JPF, providing feedback to the programmer is one of its main weaknesses. For example, for a deadlock JPF provides the programmer at which line each thread is stuck. Although this is of some use, what is much more valuable is to report how each thread got to that point.
A few extensions to JPF have recently been developed to provide some functionality to trace the executions of the threads. In this project, we will develop an extension of JPF to trace the execution of the threads and to provide feedback to the programmer.
Implement construction of procedure summaries and their usage during the state space traversal. An important part of the project will be a survey of existing literature on the topic of generating summaries, and identification of an approach that is suitable in the context of the JPF code base. Key aspects of the solution include
- designing representation of the summaries that captures all side effects of the given procedure; and
- implementing modifications of the program state.
The actual summary of a method will be computed during its first execution, and then reused within traversal of other state paths. Another possible feature is the support for externally defined summaries that would be useful for library methods.
jpf-nas is an extension of JPF that provides support for model checking distributed multithreaded Java applications. It relies on the multiprocess support included in the JPF core which provides basic functionality to verify the bytecode of distributed applications. jpf-nas supports interprocess communication via TCP sockets by modeling the Java networking package java.net. This tool can handle simple multi-client server applications. Some examples can be found in the jpf-nas distribution (at jpf-nas/src/examples/). The goal of this project is to extend the functionality of jpf-nas in various ways, such as extending the communication model supported by the tool towards an existing open source Java library/framework, called QuickServer, increasing the performance of the tool by improving the mechanism used to manage the state of communication objects, extending the tool with the cache-based approach used in net-iocache, etc.
The goal of this project is to develop techniques that analyze key properties in multi-agent systems. The jpf-mas extension will initially provide the ability to generate the reachable state space of Brahms models. The reachable state space can then be encoded into input for a variety of model checkers such as SPIN, NuSMV and PRISM, thereby enabling the verification of LTL, CTL and PCTL properties. The project will also need to investigate how to generate the set of reachable states for other kinds of models, such as Jason models, and how to compose reachable states of different modelling languages both at run-time and off-line.
The goal of this project is verifying actor-based systems using the model checking technique. This can be achieved through extending the jpf-actor extension of JPF. jpf-actor is a framework that can be used to systematically test actor programs that compile to bytecode. It requires making the codebase of jpf-actor up-to-date with the current version of jpf-core which is compatible with Java 8. It also includes extending the project towards an actor-based Scala library, called Akka.
The goal of this project is to evaluate and/or advance existing state-of-the-art tools for analysis of event-driven applications, for example jpf-awt, jpf-android. Some of the issues that need to be addressed include event sequence generation, search heuristics, and scalability. Other related problems and solutions are welcome.
Epistemic properties allow to reason about the "knowledge" of an agent in a system. Epistemic properties have been employed for several years in the specification and verification of a range of scenarios, from security to communication protocols to mental states of human agents such as pilots. There is a solid theory for epistemic properties based on the notion of observable states, and this project will build upon this. In particular, this project's aim is to extend JPF so that one can:
- describe agents' observable state;
- write epistemic specifications, e.g., using annotations;
- algorithmically prove these assertions, or generate counter-examples.
This project may use components such as jpf-symbc, jpf-concolic and jpf-abstraction and external tools such as SMT solvers.
It is well known that one of the limiting factors in symbolic execution is the path explosion problem; complex programs have billions of paths that make exhaustive exploration computationally infeasible. Recently, an approach for dramatically reducing the number of paths was proposed by Brumley in the paper: Enhancing Symbolic Execution with Veritesting, which led to dramatic performance improvements for an x86-assembly-based symbolic execution engine. This engine, run against the Debian Linux distribution, found over 11000 crash bugs and 154 privilege escalation bugs in the distribution, and achieved far greater coverage than previous approaches.
In this project, we would add support for bounded static symbolic execution to Symbolic Pathfinder. This would involve defining an optimized SSA translation for regions of java code and determining the exit points of these regions as the next region for symbolic analysis. The edges of the region are determined by non-local control jumps (function calls or exits) and by loops whose bounds cannot be easily determined. Loops are unrolled a configurable number of iterations before considering the “exit points” which are the termination of the loop or its continuation.
This project would involve a substantial refactoring of the SPF engine: one would have to consider how to execute regions of code in the JPF engine with multiple exit points. However, it could lead to orders-of-magnitude performance improvements for large programs and increased relevance of JPF for "industrial sized" programs. In addition, it could lead to a variety of continued research: for example, how to manage concurrency when using a region-based symbolic analysis approach is still unknown.
The goal of this project is to handle native calls in the context of symbolic execution by generating native peers and associating them with native methods on-the-fly. For the native peers we need concrete values to be used as input parameters for automatically generated native peers methods. The idea is to first solve the constraints obtained with symbolic execution and use those solutions as input parameters. This can be accomplished by enhancing jpf-symbc to use the jpf-nhandler extension of JPF.
Build a whitebox fuzzing tool on top of Symbolic PathFinder, that can learn the input grammar of a piece of code in an iterative fashion. The idea would be to first run the code on symbolic input of a fixed length and then learn a possible grammar for this length, at that point extend the length and generalise the grammar. The main research goal behind this project is to see if one can do whitebox fuzzing without a pre-determined seed file (which is the way most whitebox fuzzers work at the moment).
GREEN is a framework being used to cache constraints with satisfiability and model counting results during analysis. It is used in several jpf-symbc extensions for probabilistic software analysis. Recently there has been a number of suggested improvements to optimise such caching. This project will focus on two ideas: one reusing previous solutions for SAT checking and secondly to store the characterising function for model counting produced by a tool like Barvinok to allow one to reuse model counting solutions even when bounds on variables change.
This project idea seeks to improve Symbolic PathFinder by adding unit tests and improving the quality of the code base.
We are working on a number of tools that use jpf-symbc for sampling symbolic paths in order to maximize some reward function. For example, jpf-reliability is a probabilistic software analysis tool for programs with probabilistic and nondeterministic behavior. It synthesizes schedulers, i.e. resolutions of nondeterminism, that maximizes (or conversely minimizes) the probability of a property being satisfied.
Common to these tools is that sampling is highly parallelizable and a possible direction of this project could be to design and implement a distributed infrastructure for these tools. Other improvements can also be experimented with, e.g., state pruning algorithms, constraints caching, and other algorithms for sampling paths.
The goal of this project is to extend Symbolic PathFinder to verify Separation Logic assertions, and to improve test-case generation for heap-based programs. Currently, SPF uses "lazy initialization", which is a brute-force enumeration of all heap objects that can bind to the structured inputs accessed by the program. This explicit enumeration may identify many invalid heap configurations that violate properties of the data structures in the heap, which leads to a huge amount of false alarms.
Various ideas are welcome here. Here are a couple of possible subprojects:
-
The goal of this project is collecting interesting Android applications, and evaluating and applying JPF-Android to analyze them. JPF-Android is an extension to JPF used to model check Android Applications. Android applications have many dependencies which make them hard to test and verify. They also require events to drive the execution of the applications. The goal of this project is to identify interesting Android applications to run on ]JPF-Android and then evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of the tool on these apps. You will be using/improving existing approaches to generate stubs and models for applications and then compare the coverage and runtime on JPF-Android to other dynamic analysis tools.
-
This project includes using JPF-Android to generated test sequences for android applications, and implementing a tool to convert these sequences into tests that can be run on the emulator. JPF-Android verifies Android applications outside of the Android software stack on JPF using a model environment to improve coverage and efficiency. It generates event sequences to drive the execution of the application during exploration. Each sequence also includes the configuration of the environment (device) for which the sequence was executed. This project uses the AndroidViewClient API in Python to run the set of event sequences as detected by JPF-Android on an emulator to find the number of valid sequences and the code coverage they obtain compared to JPF-Android.
JDart is a dynamic symbolic execution engine Java based on Java PathFinder (JPF). The tool executes Java programs with concrete and symbolic values at the same time and records symbolic constraints describing all the decisions along a particular path of the execution. These path constraints are then used to find new paths in the program. Concrete data values for exercising these paths are generated using a constraint solver.
Currently JDart has two mechanisms for marking data values in a program for symbolic analysis. First, JDart analyzes methods during starting symbolic analysis. All parameters of an analyzed method are treated symbolically. Second, special annotations can be used to mark class members that should be analyzed symbolically. This mode of operation is geared towards generating test cases as well as the symbolic summaries of methods.
The goal of this project is to add a new mode of operation to JDart, in which symbolic variables can be introduced dynamically during execution – and also be made purely concrete again. This can be done by introducing symbolic variables for (or removing symbolic annotations from) the return values of specific methods (e.g., Random.nextInt()) – using listeners provided by JPF. This new mode of operation would have two benefits:
- Existing programs can be analyzed without modifications. And analysis is not confined to individual methods. This will, e.g., enable JDart to analyze the Java programs in the SVCOMP benchmarks (Injection Flaws).
- It is one step towards enabling using JDart for dynamic taint analysis, e.g., for analyzing potential for injection attacks (Minepump). Web-applications tend to contain code of form:
u = Request.getValueOf(“user”); //Taint u (symbolically)
query = “SELECT user FROM table WHERE uid=”+u; //query becomes tainted
query = santitize(query); //Un-taint query (symbolically.)
db.select(query);
If the value of u is not properly analyzed and sanitized, an attacker can exploit this code to gain access to arbitrary information in the applications database. Making the return value of Request.getValueOf(“user”) symbolic, is the first step towards tracing taint of this value.
Please note: For a full dynamic taint analysis, JDart would also have to be extended to analyze strings and arrays symbolically --- this is out of the scope of this project.
JDart is an open-source, dynamic symbolic analysis framework built on Java PathFinder. It has been applied to industrial scale software, including complex NASA systems.
We have many ideas for improving JDart and welcome additional ideas too:
- JDart supports various (fixed-size) symbolic data structures, e.g., arrays and HashMap. It would be interesting to improve this, in particular with symbolic array indexes and support for unbounded data structures possibly with Lazy Initialization.
- Add more exploration strategies to JDart. In particular, new exploration heuristics could be interesting, e.g., for targeted concolic execution. It could also combine other static analyses, such as, program slicing, where the computed slice can be used to constrain the exploration.
- JConstraints is a solver abstraction layer used by JDart to interact transparently with SMT solvers. JConstraints has support for some solvers, e.g., Z3 and SMTinterpol. Often, however, one needs to select a solver that is best suited for the constraints generated (e.g., linear, non-linear). It could be very useful adding additional solvers to JDart based on JConstraints and evaluate them to understand better their applicability. This could also comprise adding a general interface to solvers that support the SMTLib format.
JDart is an open-source, dynamic symbolic analysis framework built on Java PathFinder. It has been applied to industrial scale software, including complex NASA systems. This project seeks to extend this capability to Android applications by supporting the Dalvik instruction set, e.g., by using jpf-pathdroid. This would enable analyses build on JDart to also work for Android, e.g., automated test case generation, finding bugs, and program understanding.
When model checking applications belonging to specific domains (e.g., Swing, Android), JPF users have to provide application environment, consisting of test drivers and models for libraries that are too complex for JPF to run. The goal of this project is to evaluate the existing (or provide new) semi-automated support for generation of test drivers and library models/stubs based on the results of domain-specific static analysis, specifications, run-time information, or other suitable techniques. Once generated, such drivers and stubs can be used to verify applications belonging to specific domains using appropriate jpf extensions (e.g., jpf-awt, jpf-android). The project can be implemented on top of OCSEGen or another suitable tool.
When using Symbolic PathFinder (SPF), one needs to supply application environment, consisting of test drivers and models/stubs for libraries that are too complex for SPF to handle. The goal of this project is to evaluate the existing (or provide new) semi-automated support for generation of test drivers and library models/stubs, containing symbolic values, based on the results of domain-specific static analysis, specifications, run-time information, or other suitable techniques. Once generated, such drivers and stubs can be used to verify applications using SPF. The project can be implemented on top of OCSEGen or another suitable tool.
The goal of this project is to evaluate and/or advance existing state-of-the-art tools for test suite generation and augmentation based on software changes between versions. Tools like jpf-symbc, Randoop, Evosuite can be used to generate unit tests for an application under test. Other related tools and ideas are welcome.
jpf-psyco is an open-source tool built on JPF for generating temporal component interfaces. A temporal interface is expressed as a finite-state automaton over the public methods of the component and captures safe ordering relationships of method invocations. jpf-psyco relies on a combination of symbolic execution and automata learning for generating interfaces. This project seeks to evaluate jpf-psyco with new examples (e.g. reactive systems) and experimenting with other learning algorithms.
Please contact us by creating an issue. We are trying to fix the process below, which no longer works.
-
How to obtain and install JPF
- System requirements
- Downloading
- Creating a site properties file
- Building, testing, and running
- JPF plugins
-
Developer guide
- Top-level design
- Key mechanisms
- Extension mechanisms
- Common utilities
- Running JPF from within your application
- Writing JPF tests
- Coding conventions
- Hosting an Eclipse plugin update site