arXiv subjects

Javier Cabrera-Arteaga

Publications and source records attributed to Javier Cabrera-Arteaga.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Galapagos: Automated N-Version Programming with LLMs

N-Version Programming is a well-known methodology for developing fault-tolerant systems. It achieves fault detection and correction at runtime by adding diverse redundancy into programs, minimizing fault mode overlap between redundant program variants. In this work, we propose the automated generation of program variants using large language models. We design, develop and evaluate Galápagos: a tool for generating program variants using LLMs, validating their correctness and equivalence, and using them to assemble N-Version binaries. We evaluate Galápagos by creating N-Version components of real-world C code. Our original results show that Galápagos can produce program variants that are proven to be functionally equivalent, even when the variants are written in a different programming language. Our systematic diversity measurement indicates that functionally equivalent variants produced by Galápagos, are statically different after compilation, and present diverging internal behavior at runtime. We demonstrate that the variants produced by Galápagos can protect C code against real miscompilation bugs which affect the Clang compiler. Overall, our paper shows that producing N-Version software can be drastically automated by advanced usage of practical formal verification and generative language models.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

WASM-MUTATE: Fast and Effective Binary Diversification for WebAssembly

WebAssembly is the fourth officially endorsed Web language. It is recognized because of its efficiency and design, focused on security. Yet, its swiftly expanding ecosystem lacks robust software diversification systems. We introduce WASM-MUTATE, a diversification engine specifically designed for WebAssembly. Our engine meets several essential criteria: 1) To quickly generate functionally identical, yet behaviorally diverse, WebAssembly variants, 2) To be universally applicable to any WebAssembly program, irrespective of the source programming language, and 3) Generated variants should counter side-channels. By leveraging an e-graph data structure, WASM-MUTATE is implemented to meet both speed and efficacy. We evaluate WASM-MUTATE by conducting experiments on 404 programs, which include real-world applications. Our results highlight that WASM-MUTATE can produce tens of thousands of unique and efficient WebAssembly variants within minutes. Significantly, WASM-MUTATE can safeguard WebAssembly binaries against timing side-channel attacks,especially those of the Spectre type.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

WebAssembly Diversification for Malware Evasion

WebAssembly has become a crucial part of the modern web, offering a faster alternative to JavaScript in browsers. While boosting rich applications in browser, this technology is also very efficient to develop cryptojacking malware. This has triggered the development of several methods to detect cryptojacking malware. However, these defenses have not considered the possibility of attackers using evasion techniques. This paper explores how automatic binary diversification can support the evasion of WebAssembly cryptojacking detectors. We experiment with a dataset of 33 WebAssembly cryptojacking binaries and evaluate our evasion technique against two malware detectors: VirusTotal, a general-purpose detector, and MINOS, a WebAssembly-specific detector. Our results demonstrate that our technique can automatically generate variants of WebAssembly cryptojacking that evade the detectors in 90% of cases for VirusTotal and 100% for MINOS. Our results emphasize the importance of meta-antiviruses and diverse detection techniques, and provide new insights into which WebAssembly code transformations are best suited for malware evasion. We also show that the variants introduce limited performance overhead, making binary diversification an effective technique for evasion.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2022

Multi-Variant Execution at the Edge

Edge-cloud computing offloads parts of the computations that traditionally occurs in the cloud to edge nodes,e.g., CDN servers, in order to get closer to the users and reduce latency. To improve performance even further, WebAssembly is increasingly used in this context. Edge-cloud computing providers, such as Fastly or Cloudflare, let their clients deploy stateless services in the form of WebAssembly binaries, which are then translated to machine code and sandboxed for a safe execution at the edge. In this context, we propose a technique that (i) automatically diversifies WebAssembly binaries that are deployed to the edge and (ii) randomizes execution paths at runtime, turning the execution of the services into a moving target. Given a service tobe deployed at the edge, we automatically synthesize functionally equivalent variants for the functions that implement the service.All the variants are then wrapped into a single multivariant WebAssembly binary. When the service endpoint is executed,every time a function is invoked, one of its variants is randomly selected. We implement this technique in the MEWE tool and we validate it with 7 services for cryptography and QR encoding. MEWE generates multivariant binaries that embed hundreds of function variants. We execute the multivariant binaries on the worldwide edge platform provided by Fastly. We show that,at runtime, the multivariant exhibit a remarkable diversity ofexecution traces, across the whole edge platform.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2022

Superoptimization of WebAssembly Bytecode

Motivated by the fast adoption of WebAssembly, we propose the first functional pipeline to support the superoptimization of WebAssembly bytecode. Our pipeline works over LLVM and Souper. We evaluate our superoptimization pipeline with 12 programs from the Rosetta code project. Our pipeline improves the code section size of 8 out of 12 programs. We discuss the challenges faced in superoptimization of WebAssembly with two case studies.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2019

Scalable Comparison of JavaScript V8 Bytecode Traces

The comparison and alignment of runtime traces are essential, e.g., for semantic analysis or debugging. However, naive sequence alignment algorithms cannot address the needs of the modern web: (i) the bytecode generation process of V8 is not deterministic; (ii) bytecode traces are large. We present STRAC, a scalable and extensible tool tailored to compare bytecode traces generated by the V8 JavaScript engine. Given two V8 bytecode traces and a distance function between trace events, STRAC computes and provides the best alignment. The key insight is to split access between memory and disk. STRAC can identify semantically equivalent web pages and is capable of processing huge V8 bytecode traces whose order of magnitude matches today's web like https://2019.splashcon.org, which generates approx. 150k of V8 bytecode instructions.

cs.NI↗