research-article

Systematic comparison of symbolic execution systems: intermediate representation and its generation

Authors:

Sebastian Poeplau,

Aurélien FrancillonAuthors Info & Claims

ACSAC '19: Proceedings of the 35th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference

Pages 163 - 176

https://doi.org/10.1145/3359789.3359796

Published: 09 December 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Symbolic execution has become a popular technique for software testing and vulnerability detection. Most implementations transform the program under analysis to some intermediate representation (IR), which is then used as a basis for symbolic execution. There is a multitude of available IRs, and even more approaches to transform target programs into a respective IR.

When developing a symbolic execution engine, one needs to choose an IR, but it is not clear which influence the IR generation process has on the resulting system. What are the respective benefits for symbolic execution of generating IR from source code versus lifting machine code? Does the distinction even matter? What is the impact of not using an IR, executing machine code directly? We feel that there is little scientific evidence backing the answers to those questions. Therefore, we first develop a methodology for systematic comparison of different approaches to symbolic execution; we then use it to evaluate the impact of the choice of IR and IR generation. We make our comparison framework available to the community for future research.

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Cited By

Botacin M(2024)Fuzzing and Symbolic Execution for Multipath Malware Tracing: Bridging Theory and Practice via Survey and ExperimentsDigital Threats: Research and Practice10.1145/3700147Online publication date: 11-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1145/3700147
Zhou AYe CHuang HCai YZhang CTsafrir DMusuvathi MGupta RAbu-Ghazaleh N(2024)Plankton: Reconciling Binary Code and Debug InformationProceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 210.1145/3620665.3640382(912-928)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3620665.3640382
Wang HMa PWang STang QNie SWu S(2023)sem2vec: Semantics-aware Assembly Tracelet EmbeddingACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/356993332:4(1-34)Online publication date: 27-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3569933
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Systematic comparison of symbolic execution systems: intermediate representation and its generation
1. Security and privacy
  1. Software and application security
    1. Software security engineering
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging

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cover image ACM Other conferences

ACSAC '19: Proceedings of the 35th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference

December 2019

821 pages

ISBN:9781450376280

DOI:10.1145/3359789

Conference Chair:
David Balenson
SRI International

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 09 December 2019

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Agence Nationale de la Recherche

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ACSAC '19

ACSAC '19: 2019 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference

December 9 - 13, 2019

Puerto Rico, San Juan, USA

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ACSAC '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 60 of 266 submissions, 23%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 104 of 497 submissions, 21%

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Cited By

Botacin M(2024)Fuzzing and Symbolic Execution for Multipath Malware Tracing: Bridging Theory and Practice via Survey and ExperimentsDigital Threats: Research and Practice10.1145/3700147Online publication date: 11-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1145/3700147
Zhou AYe CHuang HCai YZhang CTsafrir DMusuvathi MGupta RAbu-Ghazaleh N(2024)Plankton: Reconciling Binary Code and Debug InformationProceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 210.1145/3620665.3640382(912-928)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3620665.3640382
Wang HMa PWang STang QNie SWu S(2023)sem2vec: Semantics-aware Assembly Tracelet EmbeddingACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/356993332:4(1-34)Online publication date: 27-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3569933
Poncelet CSagonas KTsiftes N(2022)So Many Fuzzers, So Little Time✱Proceedings of the 37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3551349.3556946(1-12)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3551349.3556946
Coppa EYin HDemetrescu C(2022)SymFusion: Hybrid Instrumentation for Concolic ExecutionProceedings of the 37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3551349.3556928(1-12)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3551349.3556928
Liu ZYuan YWang SBao Y(2022)SoK: Demystifying Binary Lifters Through the Lens of Downstream Applications2022 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP46214.2022.9833799(1100-1119)Online publication date: May-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/SP46214.2022.9833799
Mi XRawat SGiuffrida CBos HBilge LDumitras T(2021)LeanSym: Efficient Hybrid Fuzzing Through Conservative Constraint DebloatingProceedings of the 24th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses10.1145/3471621.3471852(62-77)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3471621.3471852
Poeplau SFrancillon ACapkun SRoesner F(2020)Symbolic execution with SYMCCProceedings of the 29th USENIX Conference on Security Symposium10.5555/3489212.3489223(181-198)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3489212.3489223
Guo SChen YYu JWu MZuo ZLi PCheng YWang H(2020)Exposing cache timing side-channel leaks through out-of-order symbolic executionProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34282154:OOPSLA(1-32)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3428215
Kloibhofer SPointhuber THeisinger MMössenböck HStadler LLeopoldseder DMarr S(2020)SymJEx: symbolic execution on the GraalVMProceedings of the 17th International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes10.1145/3426182.3426187(63-72)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3426182.3426187

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