Hercules: Reproducing crashes in real-world application binaries

Abstract

Binary analysis is a well-investigated area in software engineering and security. Given real-world program binaries, generating test inputs which cause the binaries to crash is crucial. Generation of crashing inputs has many applications including off-line analysis of software prior to deployment, or online analysis of software patches as they are inserted. In this work, we present a method for generating inputs which reach a given "potentially crashing" location. Such potentially crashing locations can be found by a separate static analysis (or by gleaning crash reports submitted by internal / external users) and serve as the input to our method. The test input generated by our method serve..