Biblio

Attack surface detection for the complex software is needed to find targets for the fuzzing, because testing the whole system with many inputs is not realistic. Researchers that previously applied taint analysis for dealing with different security tasks in the virtual machines did not examined how to apply it for attack surface detection. I.e., getting the program modules and functions, that may be affected by input data. We propose using taint tracking within a virtual machine and virtual machine introspection to create a new approach that can detect the internal module interfaces that can be fuzz tested to assure that software is safe or find the vulnerabilities.

This paper presents SWAT - System-Wide Analysis Toolkit. It is based on open source emulation and debugging projects and implements the approaches for non-intrusive system-wide analysis and debugging: lightweight OS-agnostic virtual machine introspection, full system execution replay, non-intrusive debugging with WinDbg, and full system reverse debugging. These features are based on novel non-intrusive introspection and reverse debugging methods. They are useful for stealth debugging and analysis of the platforms with custom kernels. SWAT includes multi-platform emulator QEMU with additional instrumentation and debugging features, GUI for convenient QEMU setup and execution, QEMU plugin for non-intrusive introspection, and modified version of GDB. Our toolkit may be useful for the developers of the virtual platforms, emulators, and firmwares/drivers/operating systems. Virtual machine intospection approach does not require loading any guest agents and source code of the OS. Therefore it may be applied to ROM-based guest systems and enables using of record/replay of the system execution. This paper includes the description of SWAT components, analysis methods, and some SWAT use cases.