Singularity: Pattern fuzzing forworst case complexity

Abstract

We describe a new blackbox complexity testing technique for determining the worst-case asymptotic complexity of a given application. The key idea is to look for an input pattern Drather than a concrete inputD that maximizes the asymptotic resource usage of the target program. Because input patterns can be described concisely as programs in a restricted language, our method transforms the complexity testing problem to optimal program synthesis. In particular, we express these input patterns using a new model of computation called Recurrent Computation Graph (RCG) and solve the optimal synthesis problem by developing a genetic programming algorithm that operates on RCGs. We have implemented the proposed ideas in a tool called Singularity and evaluate it on a diverse set of benchmarks. Our evaluation shows that Singularity can effectively discover the worst-case complexity of various algorithms and that it is more scalable compared to existing state-of-the-art techniques. Furthermore, our experiments also corroborate that Singularity can discover previously unknown performance bugs and availability vulnerabilities in real-world applications such as Google Guava and JGraphT.