Echidna Enters a New Era of Symbolic Execution
Posted5 months agoActive4 months ago
gustavo-grieco.github.ioTechstory
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Symbolic ExecutionSoftware DevelopmentSecurity Testing
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Symbolic Execution
Software Development
Security Testing
Echidna, a tool for symbolic execution, has entered a new era with enhanced capabilities for software security testing.
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One of the biggest pain points for debugging failures that Echidna finds is the path of getting the failure into a forge test that I can replay, and then slowly diagnosing where the bug is stemming from. An alternative path that could be useful is to stream the function call sequence (with the option to disable traces as well) to a file. This would allow easily creating a forge test from it. This file could even be used to generate a test and be diagnosed by a coding agent. Resolving the "last mile" of finding these failures would make the DX absolutely top tier.
As for converting failures into forge tests, there's multiple tools offering a solution to that problem; check out (in no particular order):
Some of them use the Echidna trace output, while others (like runes and fuzz-utils) take advantage of the fact that Echidna saves these sequences as part of the corpus during runtime (particularly, in the `reproducers` and `reproducers-unshrunk` corpus subdirectories)For what's missing from the TUI. The fact that the outputs in the main window are not selectable makes it difficult to keep the fuzzer running but copy the call sequence. I have to ctrl+c to get it into my terminal output and copy from there. I think these tools might help here though.