need help with tool requirement

bmcculley at rcn.com bmcculley at rcn.com
Wed Apr 21 01:17:01 EDT 2004


>From: kdc at rcn.com (Kevin D. Clark)  

>Unless you work for a goverment agency with a three-letter 
>acronym, this process ought to settle any doubts that you 
>have about this executable.

a) as far as I know I do not work for any three-letter
government agency (except perhaps the IRS :-( ).
b) three-letter agency security is the level of assurance desired.
c) some people might be concerned about the possibility of
TLAs being in the game, and not necessarily on the right side...

I'll send a separate message with the problem description, in
part to justify statement c, and in hope that maybe other
approaches can be suggested.  

>...
>
>Think about what you're asking for [...]

I did, and your PERL multi-liner might be the way to solve it.

>I'd suggest running your executable image through a 
>code-coverage tool [...] Then,
>run your executable image through a debugger with memory 
>watchpoints set [...]

The approach I thought of is based on doing exactly that, in
an emulator or virtual machine environment, single stepping
automagically through the debugger until a conditional
transfer of control is recognized.  At that point a snapshot
would be taken, the natural branch followed, iterating until
complete.  Then revert to the last snapshot, force the
alternative branch, repeat until done.

What's the big deal?  Seems like it could probably all be
wrapped into a PERL one-liner at the top level, even if the
one-liner has to expand into some more complex subfunctions
down the tree.

All right, I concede I am not considering potential data
dependencies (e.g. if this leg of the branch is taken some
data item(s) must be this value not that), which could affect
array indexing for example.  I'll accept that limitation for
the present, because this will not be used in isolation.

Heck, with all the work that's been done on stuff like natural
language heuristics it seems the ability to figure out the
data dependencies should be within the state of the art too,
but that is certainly a harder problem.

Comments?

Thanks for the responses so far, and TIA for any to come!

-lbm



More information about the gnhlug-discuss mailing list