SymNav: Visually Assisting Symbolic Execution

Modern software systems require the support of automatic program analyses to answer questions about their correctness, reliability, and safety. In recent years, symbolic execution techniques have played a pivotal role in this field, backing research in different domains such as software testing and software security. Like other powerful machine analyses, symbolic execution is often affected by efficiency and scalability issues that can be mitigated when a domain expert interacts with its working, steering the computation to achieve the desired goals faster. In this paper we explore how visual analytics techniques can help the user to grasp properties of the ongoing analysis and use such insights to refine the symbolic exploration process. To this end, we discuss two real-world usage scenarios from the malware analysis and the vulnerability detection domains, showing how our prototype system can help users make a wiser use of symbolic exploration techniques in the analysis of binary code.