Uroboros: Infrastructure for Reassembleable Disassembling and Transformation (v 0.11)

Installation

Uroboros uses the following utilities: (Version numbers indicate the versions that we use in our development.)

  objdump 2.30
  readelf 2.30
  awk 4.1.4

Uroboros can be built by the OCaml compiler (version 4.01.0 or later), with the following libraries:

  deriving 0.7
  ocamlfind 1.5.5
  parmap 1.0-rc6
  batteries 2.3.1
  ocamlbuild 4.01.0

We recommend to use the utilities distributed with 64-bit Ubuntu 12.0.4 LTS. The OCaml compiler and libraries can be obtained through opam.

Build

To build Uroboros, run the command below at the src folder.

    ./build

Usage: Disassembling

Uroboros can take 64-bit and 32-bit ELF executable binaries as the input. To use Uroboros for disassembling:

    python uroboros.py bzip

The disassembled output can be found at current dicrectory, named final.s. Uroboros will also assemble it back into an executable, a.out.

Python script uroboros.py provides multiple options to manipulate the disassembling process.

1. -i (iteration):

The disassemble-reassemble process can be iterated for multiple times. For example.

    python uroboros.py bzip -i 500

2. -k (keep):

This option will create a folder to store the assembly code and binary generated from each iteration. This is only effective together with -i.

    python uroboros.py bzip -i 500 -k

A subfolder will be created in ./src folder, with input binary name and timestamp. For example:

      test_fold_bzip_2015-08-31_11:11:50

3. -a (assumption):

This option configures the three symbolization assumptions proposed in the original Uroboros paper [1]. Note that in the current version, the first assumption (n-byte alignment) are set by default. The other two assumptions can be set by users.

Assumption two:

    python uroboros.py bzip -a 2

Note that by accepting this assumption, we need to put data sections (.data, .rodata and .bss) to its original starting addresses. Linker scripts can be used during reassembling. For exmaple:

    gcc -Tld_gobmk.sty final.s

Users may write their own linker script, some examples are given at ./src/ld_script folder.

Assumption three:

    python uroboros.py bzip -a 3

This assumption requires to know the function starting addresses. To obtain this information, Uroboros can take unstripped binaries as input. The function starting address information is obtained from the input, which is then stripped before disassembling.

These assumptions can be used together.

    python uroboros.py bzip -a 3 -a 2

Usage: Use Uroboros to instrument binaries

Instrumentation tools process the internal data structure of Uroboros. Some examples are shown in the ./src/plugins folder. You may start with mem_write.ml, which instruments every memory write operation.

In order to register instrumentation code, users need to add some code at ./src/ail.ml, starting from line 138. For example, in order to resgiter the "mem_write" tool, three lines of code need to be added as follows:

    let open Mem_write in
    let module MW = Mem_write in
    let il' = MW.process il in

In order to see the instrumentation result perform the rebuild (e.g., ./build) at the /src folder and further continue with usage step specified above.

We will provide a better way in our next release.

Publications

@inproceedings {190920,
author = {Shuai Wang and Pei Wang and Dinghao Wu},
title = {Reassembleable Disassembling},
booktitle = {24th {USENIX} Security Symposium ({USENIX} Security 15)},
year = {2015},
isbn = {978-1-939133-11-3},
address = {Washington, D.C.},
pages = {627--642},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity15/technical-sessions/presentation/wang-shuai},
publisher = {{USENIX} Association},
month = aug,
}