A Visual Approach to Symbolic Execution

In the modern world we live in, we are surrounded by devices that use software in some way, shape, or form. Many of these devices such as power plants, airplanes, and medical equipment are safety critical and could cause significant harm if the software controlling them was to fail. Hence, we can use a type of static software analysis called symbolic execution in order to determine the full scope of operation and detect any vulnerabilities of said software. In order to fully understand the results of this analysis it would be incredibly useful to have a means of visualizing the scope of a given program as a control flow graph (CFG), or collection of code blocks with control flow transitions. Thus we present a versatile web-based visual platform for displaying CFGs, as well as some other valuable information during symbolic execution, which is capable of running on any given web-browser. This interface is meant to be user-friendly and interactive in order to give the user a very clear image of the results of symbolic execution and the scope of a particular program. With this powerful tool, computer security professionals will be able to better assess the vulnerabilities of software and therefore maintain the integrity of safety-critical devices.