Design of Program Analysis Based Approach for Narrowing Down Misconfigurations in Beginner Network Construction Exercises

Traditionally, the identification of errors in network settings has been performed by reviewing the settings and executing diagnostic tools. However, because this method is based on the experience of the performer and also it is not procedurized, it is difficult to implement it with computers. Therefore, we focused on that it is possible to find relations between program input and output by analyzing program behavior with program analysis technique. In this paper, we propose a method to identify the network settings that affect network reachability errors by program analysis for behavior of a communication simulator program. The simulator takes network settings as a part of the input and computes communication reachability. The technical contributions of this study are as follows; 1) a formal representation that defines the specification of the exercise problems to which the proposed method can be applied, 2) the model of a simulator that is effective for the proposed method, 3) a technique that do not increase the burden on teachers in performing the method, and 4) a technique to reduce the amount of calculations required for performing the proposed method.