From Thousands of Hours to a Couple of Minutes: Automating Exploit Generation for Arbitrary Types of Kernel Vulnerabilities

Writing a working exploit for a vulnerability is generally challenging, time-consuming, and labor-intensive. To address this issue, automated exploit generation techniques can be adopted. In practice, existing techniques however exhibit an insufficient ability to craft exploits, particularly for the kernel vulnerabilities. On the one hand, this is because their technical approaches explore exploitability only in the context of a crashing process whereas generating an exploit for a kernel vulnerability typically needs to vary the context of a kernel panic. On the other hand, this is due to the fact that the program analysis techniques used for exploit generation are suitable only for simple programs but not the OS kernel which has higher complexity and scalability.In this talk, we will introduce and release a new exploitation framework to fully automate the exploitation of kernel vulnerabilities. Technically speaking, our framework utilizes a kernel fuzzing technique to diversify the contexts of a kernel panic and then leverages symbolic execution to explore exploitability under different contexts. We demonstrate that this new exploitation framework facilitates exploit crafting from many aspects.First, it augments a security analyst with the ability to automate the identification of system calls that he needs to take advantages for vulnerability exploitation. Second, it provides security analysts with the ability to achieve security mitigation bypassing. Third, it allows security analysts to automatically generate exploits with different exploitation objectives (e.g., privilege escalation or data leakage). Last but not least, it equips security analysts with an ability to generate exploits even for those kernel vulnerabilities for which the exploitability has not yet been confirmed or verified.Along with this talk, we will also release many unpublished working exploits against several kernel vulnerabilities. It should be noted that, the vulnerabilities we experimented cover primarily Use-After-Free and heap overflow. Among all these test cases, more than 50% of them do not have working exploits publicly available. To illustrate this release, I have already disclosed one working exploit at my personal website (http://ww9210.cn/). The exploit released on my site pertains to CVE-2017-15649 for which there has not yet been an exploit publicly available with the demonstration of bypassing SMAP.