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Automatic Polymorphic Exploit Generation for Software Vulnerabilities

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Book cover Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm 2013)

Abstract

Generating exploits from the perspective of attackers is an effective approach towards severity analysis of known vulnerabilities. However, it remains an open problem to generate even one exploit using a program binary and a known abnormal input that crashes the program, not to mention multiple exploits. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose PolyAEG, a system that automatically generates multiple exploits for a vulnerable program using one corresponding abnormal input. To generate polymorphic exploits, we fully leverage different trampoline instructions to hijack control flow and redirect it to malicious code in the execution context. We demonstrate that, given a vulnerable program and one of its abnormal inputs, our system can generate polymorphic exploits for the program. We have successfully generated control flow hijacking exploits for 8 programs in our experiment. Particularly, we have generated 4,724 exploits using only one abnormal input for IrfanView, a widely used picture viewer.

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© 2013 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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Wang, M., Su, P., Li, Q., Ying, L., Yang, Y., Feng, D. (2013). Automatic Polymorphic Exploit Generation for Software Vulnerabilities. In: Zia, T., Zomaya, A., Varadharajan, V., Mao, M. (eds) Security and Privacy in Communication Networks. SecureComm 2013. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 127. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04283-1_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04283-1_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-04282-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-04283-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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