HyperPUT: Generating Synthetic Faulty Programs to Challenge Bug-Finding Tools

TL;DR

HyperPUT is an automated method for generating synthetic buggy programs from seed bugs, providing a scalable way to create challenging benchmarks for evaluating bug-finding tools.

Contribution

It introduces HyperPUT, a novel technique for automatically generating synthetic buggy programs by applying transformations to seed bugs, aiding empirical evaluation of bug detection tools.

Findings

HyperPUT can generate programs with bugs that challenge bug-finding tools.

Generated bugs have characteristics similar to those in existing benchmarks.

HyperPUT supports scalable and automated benchmark creation.

Abstract

As research in automatically detecting bugs grows and produces new techniques, having suitable collections of programs with known bugs becomes crucial to reliably and meaningfully compare the effectiveness of these techniques. Most of the existing approaches rely on benchmarks collecting manually curated real-world bugs, or synthetic bugs seeded into real-world programs. Using real-world programs entails that extending the existing benchmarks or creating new ones remains a complex time-consuming task. In this paper, we propose a complementary approach that automatically generates programs with seeded bugs. Our technique, called HyperPUT, builds C programs from a "seed" bug by incrementally applying program transformations (introducing programming constructs such as conditionals, loops, etc.) until a program of the desired size is generated. In our experimental evaluation, we demonstrate how HyperPUT can generate buggy programs that can challenge in different ways the capabilities of modern bug-finding tools, and some of whose characteristics are comparable to those of bugs in existing benchmarks. These results suggest that HyperPUT can be a useful tool to support further research in bug-finding techniques -- in particular their empirical evaluation.