CAB-Fuzz: Practical Concolic Testing Techniques for COTS Operating Systems

Authors: 

Su Yong Kim, The Affiliated Institute of ETRI; Sangho Lee, Insu Yun, and Wen Xu, Georgia Tech; Byoungyoung Lee, Purdue University; Youngtae Yun, The Affiliated Institute of ETRI; Taesoo Kim, Georgia Tech

Abstract: 

Discovering the security vulnerabilities of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) operating systems (OSes) is challenging because they not only are huge and complex, but also lack detailed debug information. Concolic testing, which generates all feasible inputs of a program by using symbolic execution and tests the program with the generated inputs, is one of the most promising approaches to solve this problem. Unfortunately, the state-of-the-art concolic testing tools do not scale well for testing COTS OSes because of state explosion. Indeed, they often fail to find a single bug (or crash) in COTS OSes despite their long execution time.

In this paper, we propose CAB-FUZZ (Context-Aware and Boundary-focused), a practical concolic testing tool to quickly explore interesting paths that are highly likely triggering real bugs without debug information. First, CAB-FUZZ prioritizes the boundary states of arrays and loops, inspired by the fact that many vulnerabilities originate from a lack of proper boundary checks. Second, CAB-FUZZ exploits real programs interacting with COTS OSes to construct proper contexts to explore deep and complex kernel states without debug information. We applied CAB-FUZZ to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 and found 21 undisclosed unique crashes, including two local privilege escalation vulnerabilities (CVE- 2015-6098 and CVE-2016-0040) and one information disclosure vulnerability in a cryptography driver (CVE- 2016-7219). CAB-FUZZ found vulnerabilities that are non-trivial to discover; five vulnerabilities have existed for 14 years, and we could trigger them even in the initial version of Windows XP (August 2001).

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {203197,
author = {Su Yong Kim and Sangho Lee and Insu Yun and Wen Xu and Byoungyoung Lee and Youngtae Yun and Taesoo Kim},
title = {{CAB-Fuzz}: Practical Concolic Testing Techniques for {COTS} Operating Systems},
booktitle = {2017 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC 17)},
year = {2017},
isbn = {978-1-931971-38-6},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
pages = {689--701},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc17/technical-sessions/presentation/kim},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = jul
}

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