Thesis (M.S.)--University of Missouri--Rolla, 2007. / Vita. The entire thesis text is included in file. Title from title screen of thesis/dissertation PDF file (viewed April 11, 2007) Includes bibliographical references (p. 54-55).

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Auburn University, 2009. / Abstract. Includes bibliographic references (p.78-83).

To demonstrate working exploits or vulnerabilities, people often share their findings as a form of proof-of-concept (PoC) prototype. Such practices are particularly useful to learn about real vulnerabilities and state-of-the-art exploitation techniques. Unfortunately, the shared PoC exploits are seldom reproducible; in part because they are often not thoroughly tested, but largely because authors lack a formal way to specify the tested environment or its dependencies. Although exploit writers attempt to overcome such problems by describing their dependencies or testing environments using comments, this informal way of sharing PoC exploits makes it hard for exploit authors to achieve the original goal of demonstration. More seriously, these non- or hard-to-reproduce PoC exploits have limited potential to be utilized for other useful research purposes such as penetration testing, or in benchmark suites to evaluate defense mechanisms. In this paper, we present XShop, a framework and infrastructure to describe environments and dependencies for exploits in a formal way, and to automatically resolve these constraints and construct an isolated environment for development, testing, and to share with the community. We show how XShop's flexible design enables new possibilities for utilizing these reproducible exploits in five practical use cases: as a security benchmark suite, in pen-testing, for large scale vulnerability analysis, as a shared development environment, and for regression testing. We design and implement such applications by extending the XShop framework and demonstrate its effectiveness with twelve real exploits against well-known bugs that include GHOST, Shellshock, and Heartbleed. We believe that the proposed practice not only brings immediate incentives to exploit authors but also has the potential to be grown as a community-wide knowledge base.

published_or_final_version / abstract / Computer Science / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Computer Science and Information Systems / Master / Master of Philosophy

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Firewall testing is important because fifewall faults can lead to security failures. Firewall testing is hard because firewall rules havdp&a+eters, producing a huge number of possible parameter combinations. This thesis presents a firewall testing methodology based on test templates, which are parameterized test cases. A firewall testing framework for iptables, the Linux firewall subsystem, has been implemented. Twelve test templates have been created for testing iptables parameters and extensions. A GUI tool is also provided to integrate these test templates with various test generation strategies. The most important of these strategies, painvise generation, has been investigated in detail. Based on the investigation, we developed an improved painvise generation algorithm.