Automated Software Testing and Reverse Engineering

Software is one of the most complex artifacts of mankind has ever created, but complexity is the enemy of correctness. Modern software testing and validation tools use a multitude of techniques geared toward correct computer code, most of these are base on artificial intelligence. In this course, we study these techniques in details, specifically we will understand and implement:

• Execution monitoring

• Branch distance computation

• Hill-climbing and genetic algorithms

• Concrete and symbolic (concolic) execution

• Active state machine learning

• Genetic programming

The goal is to better understand and test software using artificial intelligence. Using the taught techniques you will be able to automatically:

• Discover which code is reachable

• Find (security) bugs in software

• Write tests that cover all reachable code

• Reverse engineer a code's functionality

• Patch code to remove bugs and failing tests