EXE: 10 years later
I've recently returned from Vienna where our CCS 2006 paper on EXE , co-authored with Vijay, Peter, David and Dawson, has received the ACM CCS Test of Time Award , which "recognizes works that had significant impact on the field, as seen from a ten-year perspective." Besides contemplating the fact that I'm old enough now to have papers that are a decade old, I was also reflecting on the various decisions taken while building EXE, as I see them ten years later. The CCS'06 paper on EXE was one of the first papers on modern symbolic execution—"modern" in the sense that symbolic execution was originally introduced in the 70s, but at a time and in a form that was not ready for primetime. EXE was the direct successor of EGT , a system in which we introduced the main ingredients of dynamic symbolic execution (DSE), but in a simplified form (and which was developed concurrently with the DART system, which introduced a different flavour of DSE). EXE is a