TAICHI: Transform Your Secret Exploits Into Mine From a Victim’s Perspective

Acquiring and analyzing exploits, which take advantage of vulnerabilities to conduct malicious actions, are crucial for victims (and defenders) when responding to system compromising incidents. However, exploits are sensitive and valuable assets that are not available to victims. The most common resource available for victims to investigate is network traffic, which covers the exploitation period. Thus reconstructing exploits from network traffic is demanded. In practice, the reconstruction process is performed manually, thus inefficient and non-scalable. In this article, we present an automated solution TAICHI to reconstruct exploits from network traffic, able to generate replica exploits and facilitate timely incident analysis. By nature, a working exploit has to satisfy (1) path constraints which ensure the program path same as the original exploit's is explored and the same vulnerability is triggered, and (2) exploit constraints which ensure the same exploitation strategy is applied, e.g., to bypass deployed defenses or to stitch multiple gadgets together. We propose a hybrid solution to this problem by integrating techniques including multi-version execution (MVE), dynamic taint analysis (DTA), and concolic execution. We have implemented a prototype of TAICHI on x86 and x86-64 Linux and tested it on the Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) dataset, several Capture the Flag (CTF) challenges, and Metasploit exploit modules targeting real world applications. The evaluation results showed that TAICHI could reconstruct exploits efficiently with a high success rate. Moreover, it could be applied to production environments without disrupting running services, and could reconstruct exploits even if only one round of exploitation traffic is available.