Topological Differential Testing

Abstract: We introduce topological differential testing (TDT), an approach to extracting the consensus behavior of a set of programs on a corpus of inputs. TDT uses the topological notion of a simplicial complex (and implicitly draws on richer topological notions such as sheaves and persistence) to determine inputs that cause inconsistent behavior and in turn reveal \emph{de facto} input specifications. We gently introduce TDT with a toy example before detailing its application to understanding the PDF file format from the behavior of various parsers. Finally, we discuss theoretical details and other possible applications.