Debugging inputs

Abstract

Program failures are often caused by invalid inputs, for instance due to input corruption. To obtain the passing input, one needs to debug the data. In this paper we present a generic technique called ddmax that (1) identifies which parts of the input data prevent processing, and (2) recovers as much of the (valuable) input data as possible. To the best of our knowledge, ddmax is the first approach that fixes faults in the input data without requiring program analysis. In our evaluation, ddmax repaired about 69% of input files and recovered about 78% of data within one minute per input.