Finding bugs in programs is hard. Automating the process is even harder. We tackled the harder problem and produced two production-quality bug-finding systems: GRR, a high-throughput fuzzer, and PySymEmu (PSE), a binary symbolic executor with support for concrete inputs.

From afar, fuzzing is a dumb, brute-force method that works surprisingly well, and symbolic execution is a sophisticated approach, involving theorem provers that decide whether or not a program is “correct.” Through this lens, GRR is the brawn while PSE is the brains. There isn’t a dichotomy though — these tools are complementary, and we use PSE to seed GRR and vice versa.

Let’s dive in and see the challenges we faced when designing and building GRR and PSE.

GRR, the fastest fuzzer around

GRR is a high speed, full-system emulator that we use to fuzz program binaries. A fuzzing “campaign” involves executing a program thousands or millions of times, each time with a different input. The hope is that spamming a program with an overwhelming number of inputs will result in triggering a bug that crashes the program.

During DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge, we went web-scale and performed tens of billions of input mutations and program executions — in only 24 hours! Below are the challenges we faced when making this fuzzer, and how we solved those problems.

Throughput. Typically, program fuzzing is split into discrete steps. A sample input is given to an input “mutator” which produces input variants. In turn, each variant is separately tested against the program in the hopes that the program will crash or execute new code. GRR internalizes these steps, and while doing so, completely eliminates disk I/O and program analysis ramp-up times, which represent a significant portion of where time is spent during a fuzzing campaign with other common tools. Transparency. Transparency requires that the program being fuzzed cannot observe or interfere with GRR. GRR achieves transparency via perfect isolation. GRR can “host” multiple 32-bit x86 processes in memory within its 64-bit address space. The instructions of each hosted process are dynamically rewritten as they execute, guaranteeing safety while maintaining operational and behavioral transparency. Reproducibility. GRR emulates both the CPU architecture and the operating system, thereby eliminating sources of non-determinism. GRR records program executions, enabling any execution to be faithfully replayed. GRR’s strong determinism and isolation guarantees let us combine the strengths of GRR with the sophistication of PSE. GRR can snapshot a running program, enabling PSE to jump-start symbolic execution from deep within a given program execution.

PySymEmu, the PhD of binary symbolic execution

Symbolic execution as a subject is hard to penetrate. Symbolic executors “reason about” every path through a program, there’s a theorem prover in there somewhere, and something something… bugs fall out the other end.

At a high level, PySymEmu (PSE) is a special kind of CPU emulator: it has a software implementation for almost every hardware instruction. When PSE symbolically executes a binary, what it really does is perform all the ins-and-outs that the hardware would do if the CPU itself was executing the code.

CPU instructions operate on registers and memory. Registers are names for super-fast but small data storage units. Typically, registers hold four to eight bytes of data. Memory on the other hand can be huge; for a 32-bit program, up to 4 GiB of memory can be addressed. PSE’s instruction simulators operate on registers and memory too, but they can do more than just store “raw” bytes — they can store expressions.

A program that consumes some input will generally do the same thing every time it executes. This happens because that “concrete” input will trigger the same conditions in the code, and cause the same loops to merry-go-round. PSE operates on symbolic input bytes: free variables that can initially take on any value. A fully symbolic input can be any input and therefore represents all inputs. As PSE emulates the CPU, if-then-else conditions impose constraints on the originally unconstrained input symbols. An if-then-else condition that asks “is input byte B less than 10” will constrain the symbol for B to be in the range [0, 10) along the true path, and to be in the range [10, 256) along the false path.

If-then-elses are like forks in the road when executing a program. At each such fork, PSE will ask its theorem prover: “if I follow the path down one of the prongs of the fork, then are there still inputs that satisfy the additional constraints imposed by that path?” PSE will follow each yay path separately, and ignore the nays.

So, what challenges did we face when creating and extending PSE?

Comprehensiveness. Arbitrary program binaries can exercise any one of thousands of the instructions available to x86 CPUs. PSE implements simulation functions for hundreds of x86 instructions. PSE falls back onto a custom, single-instruction “micro-executor” in those cases where an instruction emulation is not or cannot be provided. In practice, this setup enables PSE to comprehensively emulate the entire CPU. Scale. Symbolic executors try to follow all feasible paths through a program by forking at every if-then-else condition, and constraining the symbols one way or another along each path. In practice, there are an exponential number of possible paths through a program. PSE handles the scalability problem by selecting the best path to execute for the given execution goal, and by distributing the program state space exploration process across multiple machines. Memory. Symbolic execution produces expressions representing simple operations like adding two symbolic numbers together, or constraining the possible values of a symbol down one path of an if-then-else code block. PSE gracefully handles the case where addresses pointing into memory are symbolic. Memory accessed via a symbolic address can potentially point anywhere — even point to “good” and “bad” (i.e. unmapped) memory. Extensibility. PSE is written using the Python programming language, which makes it easy to hack on. However, modifying a symbolic executor can be challenging — it can be hard to know where to make a change, and how to get the right visibility into the data that will make the change a success. PSE includes smart extension points that we’ve successfully used for supporting concolic execution and exploit generation.

Measuring excellence

So how do GRR and PSE compare to the best publicly available tools?

GRR

GRR is both a dynamic binary translator and fuzzer, and so it’s apt to compare it to AFLPIN, a hybrid of the AFL fuzzer and Intel’s PIN dynamic binary translator. During the Cyber Grand Challenge, DARPA helpfully provided a tutorial on how to use PIN with DECREE binaries. At the time, we benchmarked PIN and found that, before we even started optimizing GRR, it was already twice as fast as PIN!

The more important comparison metric is in terms of bug-finding. AFL’s mutation engine is smart and effective, especially in terms of how it chooses the next input to mutate. GRR internalizes Radamsa, another too-smart mutation engine, as one of its many input mutators. Eventually we may also integrate AFL’s mutators. During the qualifying event, GRR went face-to-face with AFL, which was integrated into the Driller bug-finding system. Our combination of GRR+PSE found more bugs. Beyond this one data point, a head-to-head comparison would be challenging and time-consuming.

PySymEmu

PSE can be most readily compared with KLEE, a symbolic executor of LLVM bitcode, or the angr binary analysis platform. LLVM bitcode is a far cry from x86 instructions, so it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison. Luckily we have McSema, our open-source and actively maintained x86-to-LLVM bitcode translator. Our experiences with KLEE have been mostly negative; it’s hard to use, hard to hack on, and it only works well on bitcode produced by the Clang compiler.

Angr uses a customized version of the Valgrind VEX intermediate representation. Using VEX enables angr to work on many different platforms and architectures. Many of the angr examples involve reverse engineering CTF challenges instead of exploitation challenges. These RE problems often require manual intervention or state knowledge to proceed. PSE is designed to try to crash the program at every possible emulated instruction. For example PSE will use its knowledge of symbolic memory to access any possible invalid array-like memory accesses instead of just trying to solve for reaching unconstrained paths. During the qualifying event, angr went face-to-face with GRR+PSE and we found more bugs. Since then, we have improved PSE to support user interaction, concrete and concolic execution, and taint tracking.

I’ll be back!

Automating the discovery of bugs in real programs is hard. We tackled this challenge by developing two production-quality bug-finding tools: GRR and PySymEmu.

GRR and PySymEmu have been a topic of discussion in recent presentations about our CRS, and we suspect that these tools may be seen again in the near future.

Share this: Twitter

LinkedIn

Reddit

Telegram

Facebook

Pocket

Email

Print

