REAP: Reporting errors using alternative paths

Abstract

Software testing is often unable to detect all program flaws. These bugs are most commonly reported to programmers in error reports containing core dumps and/or execution traces that frequently reveal users' private information without providing all necessary information for effective debugging. Hence, these mechanisms are sparsely used due to users' data privacy concerns. This paper presents REAP, a new fault replication method, which allows for enhancing privacy protection while still providing software developers with the 'steps-to-reproduce" errors. REAP uses symbolic execution and randomized search heuristics to identify alternative execution paths leading to an observed error. We evaluated REAP using a testbed including real bugs of popular, large scale applications. The results show the high effectiveness of REAP in anonymizing user input: on average, REAP reveals only 16.78% of the bits in the original input, achieving an average residue (the number of common characters in the original and anonymized input) of 15.07%. Our evaluation also highlights that REAP significantly outperforms state of the art techniques in terms of achieved privacy and/or scalability. © 2014 Springer-Verlag.