The DOI matches its Crossref record; 1 of the 1 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Unleashing Mayhem on Binary Code
Abstract
In this paper we present Mayhem, a new system for automatically finding exploitable bugs in binary (i.e., executable) programs. Every bug reported by Mayhem is accompanied by a working shell-spawning exploit. The working exploits ensure soundness and that each bug report is security-critical and actionable. Mayhem works on raw binary code without debugging information. To make exploit generation possible at the binary-level, Mayhem addresses two major technical challenges: actively managing execution paths without exhausting memory, and reasoning about symbolic memory indices, where a load or a store address depends on user input. To this end, we propose two novel techniques: 1) hybrid symbolic execution for combining online and offline (concolic) execution to maximize the benefits of both techniques, and 2) index-based memory modeling, a technique that allows Mayhem to efficiently reason about symbolic memory at the binary level. We used Mayhem to find and demonstrate 29 exploitable vulnerabilities in both Linux and Windows programs, 2 of which were previously undocumented.
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de Moura, L., & Bjørner, N. (2008) · Lecture Notes in Computer Science · doi:10.1007/978-3-540-78800-3_24 · Cited by 6,595
Cited by
SOK: (State of) The Art of War: Offensive Techniques in Binary Analysis
Shoshitaishvili, Y., Wang, R., Salls, C., Stephens, N., Polino, M., Dutcher, A., Grosen, J., Feng, S., Hauser, C., Kruegel, C., et al. (2016) · 2016 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP) · doi:10.1109/sp.2016.17 · Cited by 957
A survey of symbolic execution techniques
Baldoni, R., Coppa, E., D’elia, D. C., Demetrescu, C., & Finocchi, I. (2019) · ACM Computing Surveys · doi:10.1145/3182657 · Cited by 708
(2021) · doi:10.1109/tse.2019.2946563 · Cited by 574
LAVA: Large-Scale Automated Vulnerability Addition
Dolan-Gavitt, B., Hulin, P., Kirda, E., Leek, T., Mambretti, A., Robertson, W., Ulrich, F., & Whelan, R. (2016) · 2016 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP) · doi:10.1109/sp.2016.15 · Cited by 300
ExploitGym: Can AI Agents Turn Security Vulnerabilities into Real Attacks?
Wang, Z., Schiller, N., Li, H., Narayana, S. S., Nasr, M., Carlini, N., Qi, X., Wallace, E., Bursztein, E., Invernizzi, L., et al. (2026) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2605.11086 · Cited by 3
Metadata
- Authors
- Cha, S. K., Avgerinos, T., Rebert, A., & Brumley, D.
- Venue
- 2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2012-05
- Pages
- 380-394
- ISSN
- 1081-6011 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2113864883
- Cited by
- 518
- References
- 1
- FWCI
- 13.83
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Cha, S. K., Avgerinos, T., Rebert, A., & Brumley, D. (2012). Unleashing Mayhem on Binary Code. 2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. https://doi.org/10.1109/sp.2012.31
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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