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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Automated exploitation of fully randomized executables

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

Despite significant research into their remediation, memory corruption vulnerabilities remain a significant issue today. Attacks created to exploit these vulnerabilities are remarkably brittle due to their dependence on the presence of specific security settings, use of certain compiler toolchains, and the target's environment. I present Marten, a new end-to-end system for automatically discovering, exploiting, and combining information leakage and buffer overflow vulnerabilities to generate exploits that are robust against defenses, compilation decisions, and environment differences. Marten has generated four control flow hijacking exploits and three information leakage exploits. One of the information leakage exploits is generated against a previously undiscovered zero-day vulnerability in Serveez-0.2.2. CVE-2019-16200 has been assigned to this vulnerability. These results highlight Marten's ability to generate robust exploits that bypass modern defenses to download and execute injected code selected by an attacker.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Master
Department dc:contributor.department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Grantor dc:publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Year dc:date.issued
2020

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Gadient, Austin James.
Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
  • Martin C. Rinard.

Subjects

dc:subject × 1

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.
Language dc:language.iso
eng

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Handle dc:identifier.uri
https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/128401
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/128401

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
MIT
Base URL
dspace.mit.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Gadient, Austin James.. Automated exploitation of fully randomized executables. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2020. https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/128401