Arbiter: Bridging the Static and Dynamic Divide in Vulnerability Discovery on Binary Programs

Authors: 

Jayakrishna Vadayath, Arizona State University; Moritz Eckert, EURECOM; Kyle Zeng, Arizona State University; Nicolaas Weideman, University of Southern California; Gokulkrishna Praveen Menon, Arizona State University; Yanick Fratantonio, Cisco Systems Inc.; Davide Balzarotti, EURECOM; Adam Doupé, Tiffany Bao, and Ruoyu Wang, Arizona State University; Christophe Hauser, University of Southern California; Yan Shoshitaishvili, Arizona State University

Abstract: 

In spite of their effectiveness in the context of vulnerability discovery, current state-of-the-art binary program analysis approaches are limited by inherent trade-offs between accuracy and scalability. In this paper, we identify a set of vulnerability properties that can aid both static and dynamic vulnerability detection techniques, improving the precision of the former and the scalability of the latter. By carefully integrating static and dynamic techniques, we detect vulnerabilities that exhibit these properties in real-world programs at a large scale.

We implemented our technique, making several advancements in the analysis of binary code, and created a prototype called ARBITER. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with a large-scale evaluation on four common vulnerability classes: CWE-131 (Incorrect Calculation of Buffer Size), CWE-252 (Unchecked Return Value), CWE-134 (Uncontrolled Format String), and CWE-337 (Predictable Seed in Pseudo-Random Number Generator). We evaluated our approach on more than 76,516 x86-64 binaries in the Ubuntu repositories and discovered new vulnerabilities, including a flaw inserted into programs during compilation.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {279936,
author = {Jayakrishna Vadayath and Moritz Eckert and Kyle Zeng and Nicolaas Weideman and Gokulkrishna Praveen Menon and Yanick Fratantonio and Davide Balzarotti and Adam Doup{\'e} and Tiffany Bao and Ruoyu Wang and Christophe Hauser and Yan Shoshitaishvili},
title = {Arbiter: Bridging the Static and Dynamic Divide in Vulnerability Discovery on Binary Programs},
booktitle = {31st USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 22)},
year = {2022},
isbn = {978-1-939133-31-1},
address = {Boston, MA},
pages = {413--430},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity22/presentation/vadayath},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}

Presentation Video