TaintSpot: Practical Taint Analysis and Exploit Generation for Java

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Presented at DEEPSEC 2020 by

Dr. Ashouri

According to the report published by the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) organization, the number of reported vulnerabilities in software systems in 1999 was less than 1600. The number of the same organization report in 2019 is nearly 100,000, approximately 60 times higher. Consequently, facing many continually growing software vulnerabilities, security experts have neither adequate time nor sufficient resources to analyze, detect, and fix these issues promptly and accurately. Hence, this situation has provided an extraordinary opportunity for cybercriminals to exploit zero-day vulnerabilities and perform attacks successfully. Consequently, the presence of practical, scalable, and precise security tools for performing genuine, in-depth, and detailed security analysis on real-world software seems to be an indispensable requirement for today's cybersecurity situation.A useful security analysis tool should identify zero-day vulnerabilities, exploits, and unseen attacks in real-world software quickly and precisely before being exploited by cyber attackers.Moreover, such a tool should be easy-to-use and deploy, cost-effective, and result in a few false positives and false negatives. Considering the facts mentioned earlier, in this work, we aim to introduce a practical framework for delivering effective security testing and automatic exploit generation for real-world software without requiring the source code or debugging information. We particularly focus on the Java ecosystem due to its prevalence and extensive impact on enterprise software systems, web applications, and the Android ecosystem. Our proposal framework, which is called "TaintSpot", will be deployed without special firmware modifications or root privileges on various hardware (e.g., x86, ARM) and standard operating systems (e.g., Linux, Windows, and FreeBSD).