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  1. Decompilation is a crucial capability in forensic analysis, facilitating analysis of unknown binaries. The recent rise of Python malware has brought attention to Python decompilers that aim to obtain source code representation from a Python binary. However, Python decompilers fail to handle various binaries, limiting their capabilities in forensic analysis. This paper proposes a novel solution that transforms a decompilation error-inducing Python binary into a decompilable binary. Our key intuition is that we can resolve the decompilation errors by transforming error-inducing code blocks in the input binary into another form. The core of our approach is the concept of Forensically Equivalent Transformation (FET) which allows non-semantic preserving transformation in the context of forensic analysis. We carefully define the FETs to minimize their undesirable consequences while fixing various error-inducing instructions that are difficult to solve when preserving the exact semantics. We evaluate the prototype of our approach with 17,117 real-world Python malware samples causing decompilation errors in five popular decompilers. It successfully identifies and fixes 77,022 errors. Our approach also handles anti-analysis techniques, including opcode remap- ping, and helps migrate Python 3.9 binaries to 3.8 binaries. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available July 1, 2024
  2. Digital content services provide users with a wide range of content, such as news, articles, or movies, while monetizing their content through various business models and promotional methods. Unfortunately, poorly designed or unpro- tected business logic can be circumvented by malicious users, which is known as business flow tampering. Such flaws can severely harm the businesses of digital content service providers. In this paper, we propose an automated approach that discov- ers business flow tampering flaws. Our technique automatically runs a web service to cover different business flows (e.g., a news website with vs. without a subscription paywall) to collect execution traces. We perform differential analysis on the execution traces to identify divergence points that determine how the business flow begins to differ, and then we test to see if the divergence points can be tampered with. We assess our approach against 352 real-world digital content service providers and discover 315 flaws from 204 websites, including TIME, Fortune, and Forbes. Our evaluation result shows that our technique successfully identifies these flaws with low false-positive and false- negative rates of 0.49% and 1.44%, respectively. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available July 1, 2024
  3. Testing database-backed web applications is chal- lenging because their behaviors (e.g., control flow) are highly dependent on data returned from SQL queries. Without a database containing sufficient and realistic data, it is challenging to reach potentially vulnerable code snippets, limiting various existing dynamic-based security testing approaches. However, obtaining such a database for testing is difficult in practice as it often contains sensitive information. Sharing it can lead to data leaks and privacy issues. In this paper, we present SYNTHDB, a program analysis- based database generation technique for database-backed PHP applications. SYNTHDB leverages a concolic execution engine to identify interactions between PHP codebase and the SQL queries. It then collects and solves various constraints to reconstruct a database that can enable exploring uncovered program paths without violating database integrity. Our evaluation results show that the database generated by SYNTHDB outperforms state-of- the-arts database generation techniques in terms of code and query coverage in 17 real-world PHP applications. Specifically, SYNTHDB generated databases achieve 62.9% code and 77.1% query coverages, which are 14.0% and 24.2% more in code and query coverages than the state-of-the-art techniques. Fur- thermore, our security analysis results show that SYNTHDB effectively aids existing security testing tools: Burp Suite, Wfuzz, and webFuzz. Burp Suite aided by SYNTHDB detects 76.8% of vulnerabilities while other existing techniques cover 55.7% or fewer. Impressively, with SYNTHDB, Burp Suite discovers 33 pre- viously unknown vulnerabilities from 5 real-world applications. 
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