Reachability Logic for Low-Level Programs

Abstract

Automatic exploit generation is a relatively new area of research. Work in this area aims to automate the manual and labor intensive task of finding exploits in software. In this paper we present a novel program logic to support automatic exploit generation. We develop a program logic called Reachability Logic, which formally defines the relation between reachability of an assertion and the preconditions which allow them to occur. This relation is then used to calculate the search space of preconditions. We show that Reachability Logic is a powerful tool in automatically finding evidence that an assertion is reachable. We verify that the system works for small litmus tests, as well as real-world algorithms. An implementation has been developed, and the entire system is proven to be sound and complete in a theorem prover. This work represents an important step towards formally verified automatic exploit generation.