Projects

There are many interesting improvements that can be done to S2E. We list some of ideas below. Feel free to propose your own on the developer’s mailing list or volunteer to contribute to an existing project! You will gain a lot of experience with low-level programming, advanced virtualization technologies, and will also help the community.

  • Symbolic execution support for standalone programs. S2E is a VM-based platform, i.e, it requires setting up a VM with an entire software stack to test programs. While useful for testing applications directly in their native environment, it comes at a non-negligible cost, which could be avoided when testing programs in isolation. Besides running entire VMs, QEMU can also emulate isolated user-mode applications. For example, it is possible to take a Linux binary compiled for, say, the ARM architecture and run it on an x86 Linux host environment. Behind the scene, QEMU automatically translates ARM to x86 and forwards all syscalls performed by the ARM binary to the x86 Linux host. The goal of this project is to add symbolic execution support to user-mode emulation, to enable symbolic execution of unmodified binaries without the overhead of the entire software stack. The main challenge of this project is how to invoke the system calls in a consistent manner without clobbering all execution states. Recall that in the VM-based symbolic execution, one can fork the entire system state, which automatically guarantees that changes done to one state do not affect the others. Since the host environment is outside the control of user-mode S2E, forking is not an option.

  • Graphical User Interface for S2E. S2E is currently configured prior to execution and has little interaction with its users during execution. S2E users have a hard time monitoring and controlling the evolution of their tests. The purpose of this project is to integrate S2E with existing development platforms, such as gdb and Eclipse. This project will bring an entirely new dimension to software debugging in Eclipse. Imagine performing queries on the debugged program, such as: “find all test scenarios for my program such that x < 15”, or “insert a breakpoint at each possible segmentation fault in my program”.

  • Linux Instrumentation Toolkit for S2E. The S2E platform was successfully applied by multiple research groups for a variety of tasks ranging from automatic device driver reverse engineering (RevEng) and testing (DDT), to multi-path performance profiling. These tools work by looking at the guest OS’s kernel and driver state in order to analyze their behavior, detect bugs, etc. Unfortunately, using S2E to perform any analysis that requires deep introspection or modification of system state is hard as the introspection API provided by S2E is very basic and low-level. The aim of this project is to provide a high-level introspection API for Linux targets in S2E (potentially based on the insight-vmi tool). Such API would significantly simplify the use of S2E for Linux software analysis and enable new applications, such as testing of multi-threaded software, performing security analysis, etc.