Sebastian Poeplau (EURECOM and Code Intelligence), Aurélien Francillon (EURECOM)

Symbolic execution is a powerful technique for software analysis and bug detection. Compilation-based symbolic execution is a recently proposed flavor that has been shown to improve the performance of symbolic execution significantly when source code is available. We demonstrate a novel technique to enable compilation-based symbolic execution of binaries (i.e., without the need for source code). Our system, SymQEMU, builds on top of QEMU, modifying the intermediate representation of the target program before translating it to the host architecture. This enables SymQEMU to compile symbolic-execution capabilities into binaries and reap the associated performance benefits while maintaining architecture independence.

We present our approach and implementation, and we show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art binary symbolic executors S2E and QSYM with statistical significance; on some benchmarks, it even achieves better performance than the source-based SymCC. Moreover, our tool has found a previously unknown vulnerability in the well-tested libarchive library, demonstrating its utility in testing real-world software.

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Hua Wu (School of Cyber Science & Engineering and Key Laboratory of Computer Network and Information Integration Southeast University, Ministry of Education, Jiangsu Nanjing, Purple Mountain Laboratories for Network and Communication Security (Nanjing, Jiangsu)), Shuyi Guo, Guang Cheng, Xiaoyan Hu (School of Cyber Science & Engineering and Key Laboratory of Computer Network and Information Integration…

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Evan Johnson (University of California San Diego), David Thien (University of California San Diego), Yousef Alhessi (University of California San Diego), Shravan Narayan (University Of California San Diego), Fraser Brown (Stanford University), Sorin Lerner (University of California San Diego), Tyler McMullen (Fastly Labs), Stefan Savage (University of California San Diego), Deian Stefan (University of California…

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