In a series of previous articles, we learnt about automated unit test generation using search-based and property-based methods. We also looked at Pathgrind, a tool for dynamic symbolic execution that can be used for automated fuzzing of binaries. Continuing on the same theme, in this article we…

In a previous article, we saw how to avoid nested try-catch-finally blocks in Java. It was pointed out to me that Java 7 (and beyond) has a new try-with-resources construct. It can take multiple resources and ensure that each resource is closed at the end of the statement. I think this new…

Error handling mechanisms like exceptions cause deviations in the usual control flow of the program. These deviations make it harder to reason about the program and are often the source of bugs in the program. Java provides exception handling via the Try-Catch-Finally statement. A www.cs.virginia.…

The "gem" file format is a self-contained standard way to package and distribute Ruby programs and libraries. It is used by RubyGems, the default package manager for Ruby. A Ruby gem is built from a given ".gemspec" file which contains the dependencies and version information of all the libraries…

In this article, we will learn about the technique of dynamic symbolic execution and how it can be used for testing and fuzzing binaries. In two previous articles (1,2), we already saw how automated methods can be used for test case generation in Java. Dynamic symbolic execution is an automated…

ANTLR (ANother Tool for Language Recognition) is a Java based framework for generating parsers from user specified grammars. The latest major version (v4) of the tool is based on the Adaptive LL(*) parsing algorithm developed by Professor Terence Parr from the University of San Francisco. ANTLR 4…