AppChainer:investigating the chainability among payloads in android applications

Statistics show that more than 80 applications are installed on each android smartphone.Vulnerability research on Android applications is of critical importance.Recently,academic researchers mainly focus on single bug patterns,while few of them investigate the relations between multiple bugs.Industrial researchers proposed a series of logic exploit chains leveraging multiple logic bugs.However,there is no general model to evaluate the chaining abilities between bugs.This paper presents a formal model to elucidate the relations between multiple bugs in Android applications.To prove the effectiveness of the model,we design and implement a prototype system named AppChainer.AppChainer automatically identifies attack surfaces of Android applications and investigates whether the payloads entering these attack surfaces are“chainable”.Experimental results on 2138 popular Android applications show that AppChainer is effective in identifying and chaining attacker-controllable payloads.It identifies 14467 chainable payloads and constructs 5458 chains both inside a single application and among various applications.The time cost and resource consumption of AppChainer are also acceptable.For each application,the average analysis time is 317 s,and the average memory consumed is 2368 MB.Compared with the most relevant work Jandroid,the experiment results on our custom DroidChainBench show that AppChainer outperforms Jandroid at the precision rate and performs equally with Jandroid at the recall rate.

Memory access integrity:detecting fine-grained memory access errors in binary code

As one of the most notorious programming errors,memory access errors still hurt modern software security.Particularly,they are hidden deeply in important software systems written in memory unsafe languages like C/C++.Plenty of work have been proposed to detect bugs leading to memory access errors.However,all existing works lack the ability to handle two challenges.First,they are not able to tackle fine-grained memory access errors,e.g.,data overflow inside one data structure.These errors are usually overlooked for a long time since they happen inside one memory block and do not lead to program crash.Second,most existing works rely on source code or debugging information to recover memory boundary information,so they cannot be directly applied to detection of memory access errors in binary code.However,searching memory access errors in binary code is a very common scenario in software vulnerability detection and exploitation.In order to overcome these challenges,we propose Memory Access Integrity(MAI),a dynamic method to detect finegrained memory access errors in off-the-shelf binary executables.The core idea is to recover fine-grained accessing policy between memory access behaviors and memory ranges,and then detect memory access errors based on the policy.The key insight in our work is that memory accessing patterns reveal information for recovering the boundary of memory objects and the accessing policy.Based on these recovered information,our method maintains a new memory model to simulate the life cycle of memory objects and report errors when any accessing policy is violated.We evaluate our tool on popular CTF datasets and real world softwares.Compared with the state of the art detection tool,the evaluation result demonstrates that our tool can detect fine-grained memory access errors effectively and efficiently.As the practical impact,our tool has detected three 0-day memory access errors in an audio decoder.

From proof-of-concept to exploitable

Exploitability assessment of vulnerabilities is important for both defenders and attackers.The ultimate way to assess the exploitability is crafting a working exploit.However,it usually takes tremendous hours and significant manual efforts.To address this issue,automated techniques can be adopted.Existing solutions usually explore in depth the crashing paths,i.e.,paths taken by proof-of-concept(PoC)inputs triggering vulnerabilities,and assess exploitability by finding exploitable states along the paths.However,exploitable states do not always exist in crashing paths.Moreover,existing solutions heavily rely on symbolic execution and are not scalable in path exploration and exploit generation.In this paper,we propose a novel solution to generate exploit for userspace programs or facilitate the process of crafting a kernel UAF exploit.Technically,we utilize oriented fuzzing to explore diverging paths from vulnerability point.For userspace programs,we adopt a control-flow stitching solution to stitch crashing paths and diverging paths together to generate exploit.For kernel UAF,we leverage a lightweight symbolic execution to identify,analyze and evaluate the system calls valuable and useful for exploiting vulnerabilities.We have developed a prototype system and evaluated it on a set of 19 CTF(capture the flag)programs and 15 realworld Linux kernel UAF vulnerabilities.Experiment results showed it could generate exploit for most of the userspace test set,and it could also facilitate security mitigation bypassing and exploitability evaluation for kernel test set.

From proof-of-concept to exploitable

Exploitability assessment of vulnerabilities is important for both defenders and attackers.The ultimate way to assess the exploitability is crafting a working exploit.However,it usually takes tremendous hours and significant manual efforts.To address this issue,automated techniques can be adopted.Existing solutions usually explore in depth the crashing paths,i.e.,paths taken by proof-of-concept(PoC)inputs triggering vulnerabilities,and assess exploitability by finding exploitable states along the paths.However,exploitable states do not always exist in crashing paths.Moreover,existing solutions heavily rely on symbolic execution and are not scalable in path exploration and exploit generation.In this paper,we propose a novel solution to generate exploit for userspace programs or facilitate the process of crafting a kernel UAF exploit.Technically,we utilize oriented fuzzing to explore diverging paths from vulnerability point.For userspace programs,we adopt a control-flow stitching solution to stitch crashing paths and diverging paths together to generate exploit.For kernel UAF,we leverage a lightweight symbolic execution to identify,analyze and evaluate the system calls valuable and useful for exploiting vulnerabilities.We have developed a prototype system and evaluated it on a set of 19 CTF(capture the flag)programs and 15 realworld Linux kernel UAF vulnerabilities.Experiment results showed it could generate exploit for most of the userspace test set,and it could also facilitate security mitigation bypassing and exploitability evaluation for kernel test set.

Memory access integrity:detecting fine-grained memory access errors in binary code

As one of the most notorious programming errors,memory access errors still hurt modern software security.Particularly,they are hidden deeply in important software systems written in memory unsafe languages like C/C++.Plenty of work have been proposed to detect bugs leading to memory access errors.However,all existing works lack the ability to handle two challenges.First,they are not able to tackle fine-grained memory access errors,e.g.,data overflow inside one data structure.These errors are usually overlooked for a long time since they happen inside one memory block and do not lead to program crash.Second,most existing works rely on source code or debugging information to recover memory boundary information,so they cannot be directly applied to detection of memory access errors in binary code.However,searching memory access errors in binary code is a very common scenario in software vulnerability detection and exploitation.In order to overcome these challenges,we propose Memory Access Integrity(MAI),a dynamic method to detect finegrained memory access errors in off-the-shelf binary executables.The core idea is to recover fine-grained accessing policy between memory access behaviors and memory ranges,and then detect memory access errors based on the policy.The key insight in our work is that memory accessing patterns reveal information for recovering the boundary of memory objects and the accessing policy.Based on these recovered information,our method maintains a new memory model to simulate the life cycle of memory objects and report errors when any accessing policy is violated.We evaluate our tool on popular CTF datasets and real world softwares.Compared with the state of the art detection tool,the evaluation result demonstrates that our tool can detect fine-grained memory access errors effectively and efficiently.As the practical impact,our tool has detected three 0-day memory access errors in an audio decoder.