ACHIYA ELYASAF

Senior Academic

Black-Box Bug Amplification for Multithreaded Software

Yeshayahu Weiss, Gal Amram, Achiya Elyasaf, Eitan Farchi, Oded Margalit,Gera Weiss

Bugs, especially those in concurrent systems, are often hard to reproduce because they manifest only under rare conditions. Testers frequently encounter failures that occur only under specific inputs, often at low probability. We propose an approach to systematically amplify the occurrence of such elusive bugs. We treat the system under test as a black-box system and use repeated trial executions to train a predictive model that estimates the probability of a given input configuration triggering a bug. We evaluate this approach on a dataset of 17 representative concurrency bugs spanning diverse categories. Several model-based search techniques are compared against a brute-force random sampling baseline. Our results show that an ensemble stacking classifier can significantly increase bug occurrence rates across nearly all scenarios, often achieving an order-of-magnitude improvement over random sampling. The contributions of this work include the following: (i) a novel formulation of bug amplification as a rare-event classification problem; (ii) an empirical evaluation of multiple techniques for amplifying bug occurrence, demonstrating the effectiveness of model-guided search; and (iii) a practical, non-invasive testing framework that helps practitioners to expose hidden concurrency faults without altering the internal system architecture.

Publication language English
Journal Mathematics
Volume 13
Issue number 18
Publication status Published - 01.09.2025
2921

Keywords

black-box testing
bug reproduction
concurrency bugs
ensemble methods
model-based testing
noise-tolerant learning
probabilistic bug amplification
rare-event detection
search-based software testing

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Computer Science (miscellaneous)
General Mathematics
Engineering (miscellaneous)
Access to Document
10.3390/math13182921
Other files and links
Link to publication in Scopus