Automatic Exploit Generation for Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities

Buffer overflow vulnerabilities are widely found in software. Finding these vulnerabilities and identifying whether these vulnerabilities can be exploit is very important. However, it is not easy to find all of the buffer overflow vulnerabilities in software programs, and it is more difficult to find and exploit these vulnerabilities in binary programs. This paper proposes a method and a corresponding tool that automatically finds buffer overflow vulnerabilities in binary programs, and then automatically generate exploit for the vulnerability. The tool uses symbolic execution to search the target software and find potential buffer overflow vulnerabilities, then try to bypass system protection by choosing different exploiting method according to the different level of protections. Finally, the exploit of software vulnerability is generated using constraint solver. The method and tool can automatically find vulnerabilities and generate exploits for three kinds of protection: without system protection, with address space layout randomization protection, and with stack non-executable protection.