Characterization of bugs and attack vectors is in many practical scenarios as important as their finding. Recently, Girol et al. have introduced the concept of robust reachability , which ensures a perfect reproducibility of the reported violations by distinguishing inputs that are under the control of the attacker ( controlled inputs ) from those that are not ( uncontrolled inputs ), and proposed first automated analysis for it. While it is a step toward distinguishing severe bugs from benign ones, it fails for example to describe violations that are mostly reproducible, i.e., when triggering conditions are likely to happen, meaning that they happen for all uncontrolled inputs but a few corner cases. To address this issue, we propose to leverage theory-agnostic abduction techniques to generate constraints on the uncontrolled program inputs that ensure that a target property is robustly satisfied . Our proposal comes with an extension of robust reachability that is generic on the type of trace property and on the technology used to verify the properties. We show that our approach is complete w.r.t. its inference language , and we additionally discuss strategies for the efficient exploration of the inference space. We demonstrate the feasibility of the method and its practical ability to refine the notion of robust reachability with an implementation that uses robust reachability oracles to generate constraints on standard benchmarks from software verification and security analysis. We illustrate the use of our implementation to a vulnerability characterization problem in the context of fault injection attacks. Our method overcomes a major limitation of the initial proposal of robust reachability, without complicating its definition. From a practical view, this is a step toward new verification tools that are able to characterize program violations through high-level feedback.

To protect cryptographic implementations from side-channel vulnerabilities, developers must adopt constant-time programming practices. As these can be error-prone, many side-channel detection tools have been proposed. Despite this, such vulnerabilities are still manually found in cryptographic libraries. While a recent paper by Jancar et al. shows that developers rarely perform side-channel detection, it is unclear if existing detection tools could have found these vulnerabilities in the first place.

Inline assembly is still a common practice in low-level C programming, typically for efficiency reasons or for accessing specific hardware resources. Such embedded assembly codes in the GNU syntax (supported by major compilers such as GCC, Clang and ICC) have an interface specifying how the assembly codes interact with the C environment. For simplicity reasons, the compiler treats GNU inline assembly codes as blackboxes and relies only on their interface to correctly glue them into the compiled C code. Therefore, the adequacy between the assembly chunk and its interface (named compliance) is of primary importance, as such compliance issues can lead to subtle and hard-to-find bugs. We propose RUSTInA, the first automated technique for formally checking inline assembly compliance, with the extra ability to propose (proven) patches and (optimization) refinements in certain cases. RUSTInA is based on an original formalization of the inline assembly compliance problem together with novel dedicated algorithms. Our prototype has been evaluated on 202 Debian packages with inline assembly (2656 chunks), finding 2183 issues in 85 packages - 986 significant issues in 54 packages (including major projects such as ffmpeg or ALSA), and proposing patches for 92% of them. Currently, 38 patches have already been accepted (solving 156 significant issues), with positive feedback from development teams.

Formal methods for software development have made great strides in the last two decades, to the point that their application in safety-critical embedded software is an undeniable success. Their extension to non-critical software is one of the notable forthcoming challenges. For example, C programmers regularly use inline assembly for low-level optimizations and system primitives. This usually results in rendering state-of-the-art formal analyzers developed for C ineffective. We thus propose TINA, the first automated, generic, verification-friendly and trustworthy lifting technique turning inline assembly into semantically equivalent C code amenable to verification, in order to take advantage of existing C analyzers. Extensive experiments on real-world code (including GMP and ffmpeg) show the feasibility and benefits of TINA.