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Creators/Authors contains: "Shen, Zekun"

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  1. Peripheral hardware in modern computers is typically assumed to be secure and not malicious, and device drivers are implemented in a way that trusts inputs from hardware. However, recent vulnerabilities such as Broadpwn have demonstrated that attackers can exploit hosts through vulnerable peripherals, highlighting the importance of securing the OS-peripheral boundary. In this paper, we propose a hardware-free concolic-augmented fuzzer targeting WiFi and Ethernet drivers, and a technique for generating high-quality initial seeds, which we call golden seeds, that allow fuzzing to bypass difficult code constructs during driver initialization. Compared to prior work using symbolic execution or greybox fuzzing, Drifuzz is more successful at automatically finding inputs that allow network interfaces to be fully initialized, and improves fuzzing coverage by 214% (3.1×) in WiFi drivers and 60% (1.6×) for Ethernet drivers. During our experiments with fourteen PCI and USB network drivers, we find twelve previously unknown bugs, two of which were assigned CVEs. 
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  2. null (Ed.)
    Use-after-free (UAF) vulnerabilities, in which dangling pointers remain after memory is released, remain a persistent problem for applications written in C and C++. In order to protect legacy code, prior work has attempted to track pointer propagation and invalidate dangling pointers at deallocation time, but this work has gaps in coverage, as it lacks support for tracking program variables promoted to CPU registers. Moreover, we find that these gaps can significantly hamper detection of UAF bugs: in a preliminary study with OSS-Fuzz, we found that more than half of the UAFs in real-world programs we examined (10/19) could not be detected by prior systems due to register promotion. In this paper, we introduce HeapExpo, a new system that fills this gap in coverage by parsimoniously identifying potential dangling pointer variables that may be lifted into registers by the compiler and marking them as volatile. In our experiments, we find that HeapExpo effectively detects UAFs missed by other systems with an overhead of 35% on the majority of SPEC CPU2006 and 66% when including two benchmarks that have high amounts of pointer propagation. 
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