GreyConE: Greybox fuzzing+Concolic execution guided test generation for high level design

TL;DR

GreyConE combines greybox fuzzing and concolic execution to efficiently generate high-quality test cases for high-level hardware designs, improving coverage and runtime over existing methods.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic approach that interleaves greybox fuzzing with concolic execution for faster, more effective testing of SystemC hardware designs.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art in branch coverage and test case generation.

Reduces runtime for testing high-level hardware designs.

Achieves higher coverage with fewer test cases.

Abstract

Exhaustive testing of high-level designs pose an arduous challenge due to complex branching conditions, loop structures and inherent concurrency of hardware designs. Test engineers aim to generate quality test-cases satisfying various code coverage metrics to ensure minimal presence of bugs in a design. Prior works in testing SystemC designs are time inefficient which obstruct achieving the desired coverage in shorter time-span. We interleave greybox fuzzing and concolic execution in a systematic manner and generate quality test-cases accelerating test coverage metrics. Our results outperform state-of-the-art methods in terms of number of test cases and branch-coverage for some of the benchmarks, and runtime for most of them.