Automating Vulnerability Discovery in Critical Applications

Our Approach: Automate Discovery, Prioritize Results, Address the Most Important Vulnerabilities First

Our approach to vulnerability discovery builds on an extensive body of work at Carnegie Mellon University and the SEI's CERT Division. This work includes the following techniques:

Black-box mutational fuzzing—Mutational fuzzing randomly introduces mutations into starting inputs called seed files. It then runs these modified inputs on the program to see if it causes a crash. Fuzzing is one of the most effective vulnerability discovery techniques in practice, and the SEI maintains its own black-box fuzzer, the CERT Basic Fuzzing Framework.
Vulnerability uniqueness determination—A primary challenge in vulnerability discovery is understanding which vulnerability triggered a crash and how serious that vulnerability is. For example, in one of our recent experiments, a major vendor's software produced over 40,000 exploitable crashes, but these crashes were caused by only a few vulnerabilities. We use a new technique that applies software patches to identify the scope of a vulnerability, which allows us to precisely count the number of vulnerabilities that a particular vulnerability discovery technique identifies.

Combining Fuzzing with Concolic Execution

ForAllSecure is a start-up company on a mission to make software safer. The ForAllSecure team builds software security tools for developers, enterprises, and end users that automatically find vulnerabilities in software at the binary level, using research transitioned from the Carnegie Mellon University CyLab.

ForAllSecure is one of the world’s leading experts on binary concolic execution and is widely known for its Mayhem concolic executor, which recently won DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge competition. Concolic execution is a powerful form of symbolic program analysis that describes program executions as logical formulas and solves them to trigger and test new fragments of program code. Concolic execution is known for its ability to trigger code that is difficult to reach, allowing it to find vulnerabilities that other techniques such as fuzzing might miss. This power comes with a price, however, as concolic execution tends to be slow and has not scaled to large programs.

By joining our expertise in fuzzing with ForAllSecure’s expertise in concolic execution, we have been collaborating on a new technique that brings the best of both fuzzing and concolic execution. Fuzzing brings scalability, speed, and the ability to discover vulnerabilities in large, complex programs. Concolic execution allows analysts to omit seed files, making the process of vulnerability discovery easier than ever. It also allows software analysts to test and detect vulnerabilities in code that is difficult for a fuzzer to reach.

Software and Tools

Big Grep

August 2017

BigGrep is a tool used to index and search a large corpus of binary files and uses a probabilistic N-gram based approach to balance index size and search...