A Survey of Symbolic Execution Techniques (2018)

Re:A Survey of Symbolic Execution Techniques (2018) by dtornabene on Tuesday May 21, 2019 @09:28AM (#19969923)

This is a solid paper if you want to learn something about SymbEx. If it really interests you and you want something more tutorial oriented, pick up a copy of Practical Binary Analysis, out recently from nostarch. The last chapters are a tutorial intro to it using Triton. If you're a functional programmer and already know some Haskell or Ocaml or are able to pick it up quickly, check out BAP, the binary analysis platform, its got a bunch of tools/analysis built in already for this stuff and there's a fair amount of fascinating research done using or on the platform itself.

https://practicalbinaryanalysis.com/

https://github.com/BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap

Cool fact about BAP, there's a really weird but very cool embedded lisp that allows you to drive execution of single instructions via meta programming. It works via a term rewriting system. Seriously one of the coolest lisps I've found out in the wild.

http://binaryanalysisplatform.github.io/bap/api/master/Bap_p...

Also, the docs for the project are borderline decadent in their completeness and the team responsible are quite active via gitter. For real, if you're interested in binary analysis, check it out.

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Re:A Survey of Symbolic Execution Techniques (2018) by tempguy9999 on Tuesday May 21, 2019 @09:48AM (#19970087)

No offence intended I don't really see the value of this book WRT to this paper. The paper seems to be about HLLs where the book, great as it surely is, is 90% about, well, binaries.

Given that I won't have time to learn binary analysis (there's no payback for me), is it really worth getting the book just for the final chapter, which I presume is not going to cover HLLs anyway?

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Re:A Survey of Symbolic Execution Techniques (2018) by dtornabene on Tuesday May 21, 2019 @10:39AM (#19970530)

I mean, my comment was pretty straight forward as to the relation? The book has full, detailed code listings and provides a vm with runnable code, you end the book building an automatic exploitation engine for a C++ program, so it does cover HLLs? The binaries in the book are all C/C++ programs. I guess I don't really get the comment(no offense taken), given that techniques like symbex are used on binaries written in HLLs. The paper itself is a survey of the tradeoffs inherent in different implementations of symbex. So, if you want to get a sense of what symbex is, read the paper and follow up with some of the endnotes, if you want to build an application that actually uses symbex buy the book and work through it. Hope this helps!

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