Concolic Testing of Front-end JavaScript

Abstract

JavaScript has become the most popular programming language for web front-end development. With such popularity, there is a great demand for thorough testing of client-side JavaScript web applications. In this paper, we present a novel approach to concolic testing of front-end JavaScript web applications. This approach leverages widely used JavaScript testing frameworks such as Jest and Puppeteer and conducts concolic execution on JavaScript functions in web applications for unit testing. The seamless integration of concolic testing with these testing frameworks allows injection of symbolic variables within the native execution context of a JavaScript web function and precise capture of concrete execution traces of the function under test. Such concise execution traces greatly improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the subsequent symbolic analysis for test generation. We have implemented our approach on Jest and Puppeteer. The application of our Jest implementation on Metamask, one of the most popular Crypto wallets, has uncovered 3 bugs and 1 test suite improvement, whose bug reports have all been accepted by Metamask developers on Github. We also applied our Puppeteer implementation to 21 Github projects and detected 4 bugs.