Retrowrite: Statically Instrumenting Cots Binaries for Fuzzing and Sanitization
Abstract
End users of closed-source software currently cannot easily analyze the security of programs or patch them if flaws are found. Notably, end users can include developers who use third party libraries. The current state of the art for coverage-guided binary fuzzing or binary sanitization is dynamic binary translation, which results in prohibitive overhead. Existing static rewriting techniques cannot fully recover symbolization information, and so have difficulty modifying binaries to track code coverage for fuzzing or add security checks for sanitizersThe ideal solution for adding instrumentation is a static rewriter that can intelligently add in the required instrumentation as if it were inserted at compile time. This requires analysis to statically disambiguate between references and scalars, a problem known to be undecidable in the general case. We show that recovering this information is possible in practice for the most common class of software and libraries: 64 bit, position independent code. Based on our observation, we design a binary-rewriting instrumentation to support American Fuzzy Lop (AFL) and Address Sanitizer (ASan), and show that we achieve compiler levels of performance, while retaining precision. Binaries rewritten for coverage-guided fuzzing using RetroWrite are identical in performance to compiler-instrumented binaries and outperforms the default QEMU-based instrumentation by 7.5x while triggering more bugs. Our implementation of binary-only Address Sanitizer is 3x faster than Valgrind memcheck, the state-of-the-art binary-only memory checker, and detects 80% more bugs in our security evaluation.
Degree
M.Sc.
Advisors
Payer, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Design|Computer science|Logic
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