Dynamic Analysis and Debugging of Binary Code for Security Applications

Dynamic analysis techniques have made a significant impact in security practice, e.g. by automating some of the most tedious processes in detecting vulnerabilities. However, a significant gap remains between existing software tools and what many security applications demand. In this paper, we present our work on developing a cross-platform interactive analysis tool, which leverages techniques such as symbolic execution and taint tracking to analyze binary code on a range of platforms. The tool builds upon IDA, a popular reverse engineering platform, and provides a unified analysis engine to handle various instruction sets and operating systems. We have evaluated the tool on a set of real-world applications and shown that it can help identify the root causes of security vulnerabilities quickly.