Date of Award

Fall 10-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Cyber Operations (PhDCO)

First Advisor

Varghese Vaidyan

Second Advisor

Michael Ham

Third Advisor

Andrew Kramer

Fourth Advisor

Yong Wang

Abstract

The problem of fully automating heap exploit generation remains unsolved. An examination of current research in this field reveals that it is both a challenging research topic and one that is currently understudied relative to stack-based automation. This research has the potential to help understand and detect memory-related issues, such as memory leaks, within a program, without needing to spend significant time studying the program or to more quickly triage a given vulnerability to understand its potential impacts and the possibility for exploitation. Even in the most compelling related research, there are significant gaps before it will be possible to fully automate heap-based exploit development in a realistic environment. To achieve the research goal of decreasing the time required to perform heap exploitation by developing a tool to accurately detect all heap primitives within a target program in an automated fashion, an artifact to detect these heap primitives must be created. This artifact will be evaluated based on a set of requirements at the completion of the research. The first of these requirements is that the analysis can be completed within bounded time, avoiding issues such as infinite loops or state explosion, which are common issues with symbolic execution. Secondly, the artifact should perform an exhaustive search for all primitives within the target software, even if this results in false positives. Additionally, the artifact must provide associated details about the primitives that it is able to detect, including the code path for the primitive and other allocations that occur as a result of the code in the primitive. Finally, accuracy of the artifact is of the highest importance, ensuring that correct details about the detected primitives are reported.

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