2014 Symposium Posters

Project Members
Sam Jero, Hyojeong Lee and Cristina Nita-Rotaru

We propose a platform for automatically finding attacks in transport protocol implementations. Our platform uses virtual machines connected with a network emulator to run unmodified target implementations, ensuring realism. We focus on attacks involving the manipulation or injection of protocol messages and build a framework to perform these basic malicious actions. To mitigate state-space explosion resulting from numerous combinations of malicious actions and protocol messages, we leverage protocol states. First, we build a state tracker that can infer the current state of the target system from message traces. Using the state tracker and a benign execution, we classify states based on observable characteristics. We then associate basic attack actions with characteristics of states and compose attack strategies based on this information. We monitor the effect of these attack strategies and determine which actions are effective for which states. We use this information to focus or prune our attack strategies for states with similar characteristics.