CS&E Colloquium: Symbolic Execution as a Flexible Tool for Binary Analysis

The computer science colloquium takes place on Mondays from 11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.

This week's speaker, Stephen McCamant (University of Minnesota), will be giving a talk titled "Symbolic Execution as a Flexible Tool for Binary Analysis."

Abstract

Analyzing software at the binary (machine code) level is advantageous or required in many scenarios, but it can be more challenging than source-level analysis because of the complexities of instruction sets and a lack of high-level structure. Symbolic execution is a very useful approach for building binary analyses because it encapsulates instruction-set complexity, does not require high-level structure, and serves as a foundation on which a variety of analyses can be built. I'll describe the open-source FuzzBALL system for binary symbolic execution we are developing at the University of Minnesota to discuss some design trade-offs. Then I'll briefly sketch three applications of binary symbolic execution. In test generation for security vulnerabilities, symbolic execution acts as an enhanced dynamic analysis. In enumerating the targets of jump tables, symbolic execution acts as a static analysis without conservative approximation.  And in generating tests for CPU emulators, it performs bounded-exhaustive enumeration.

Biography

Stephen McCamant is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, where he has been since the fall of 2012. His main research area is program analysis for software security and correctness. He is especially interested in binary code analysis and transformation, hybrid dynamic/static techniques and symbolic execution, information flow/taint analysis, and applications of decision procedures. His research on software-based fault isolation won the USENIX Security Test of Time award in 2018, and was adopted in Google's Native Client system. He received his Ph.D from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2008, and from 2008-2012 he was a postdoc at UC Berkeley.

Category
Start date
Monday, Oct. 11, 2021, 11:15 a.m.
End date
Monday, Oct. 11, 2021, 12:15 p.m.
Location

Keller Hall 3-230

Share