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Md Shafiuzzaman

Publications and source records attributed to Md Shafiuzzaman.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

Program Analysis Guided LLM Agent for Proof-of-Concept Generation

Software developers frequently receive vulnerability reports that require them to reproduce the vulnerability in a reliable manner by generating a proof-of-concept (PoC) input that triggers it. Given the source code for a software project and a specific code location for a potential vulnerability, automatically generating a PoC for the given vulnerability has been a challenging research problem. Symbolic execution and fuzzing techniques require expert guidance and manual steps and face scalability challenges for PoC generation. Although recent advances in LLMs have increased the level of automation and scalability, the success rate of PoC generation with LLMs remains quite low. In this paper, we present a novel approach called Program Analysis Guided proof of concept generation agENT (PAGENT) that is scalable and significantly improves the success rate of automated PoC generation compared to prior results. PAGENT integrates lightweight and rule-based static analysis phases for providing static analysis guidance and sanitizer-based profiling and coverage information for providing dynamic analysis guidance with a PoC generation agent. Our experiments demonstrate that the resulting hybrid approach significantly outperforms the prior top-performing agentic approach by 132% for the PoC generation task.

cs.SE

Guiding Symbolic Execution with Static Analysis and LLMs for Vulnerability Discovery

Symbolic execution detects vulnerabilities with precision, but applying it to large codebases requires harnesses that set up symbolic state, model dependencies, and specify assertions. Writing these harnesses has traditionally been a manual process requiring expert knowledge, which significantly limits the scalability of the technique. We present Static Analysis Informed and LLM-Orchestrated Symbolic Execution (SAILOR), which automates symbolic execution harness construction by combining static analysis with LLM-based synthesis. SAILOR operates in three phases: (1) static analysis identifies candidate vulnerable locations and generates vulnerability specifications; (2) an LLM uses vulnerability specifications and orchestrates harness synthesis by iteratively refining drivers, stubs, and assertions against compiler and symbolic execution feedback; symbolic execution then detects vulnerabilities using the generated harness, and (3) concrete replay validates the symbolic execution results against the unmodified project source. This design combines the scalability of static analysis, the code reasoning of LLMs, the path precision of symbolic execution, and the ground truth produced by concrete execution. We evaluate SAILOR on 10 open-source C/C++ projects totaling 6.8 M lines of code. SAILOR discovers 379 distinct, previously unknown memory-safety vulnerabilities (421 confirmed crashes). The strongest of five baselines we compare SAILOR to (agentic vulnerability detection using Claude Code with full codebase access and unlimited interaction), finds only 12 vulnerabilities. Each phase of SAILOR is critical: Without static analysis targeting confirmed vulnerabilities drop 12.2X; without iterative LLM synthesis zero vulnerabilities are confirmed; and without symbolic execution no approach can detect more than 12 vulnerabilities.

cs.CR

MSRANetV2: An Explainable Deep Learning Architecture for Multi-class Classification of Colorectal Histopathological Images

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a leading worldwide cause of cancer-related mortality, and the role of prompt precise detection is of paramount interest in improving patient outcomes. Conventional diagnostic methods such as colonoscopy and histological examination routinely exhibit subjectivity, are extremely time-consuming, and are susceptible to variation. Through the development of digital pathology, deep learning algorithms have become a powerful approach in enhancing diagnostic precision and efficiency. In our work, we proposed a convolutional neural network architecture named MSRANetV2, specially optimized for the classification of colorectal tissue images. The model employs a ResNet50V2 backbone, extended with residual attention mechanisms and squeeze-and-excitation (SE) blocks, to extract deep semantic and fine-grained spatial features. With channel alignment and upsampling operations, MSRANetV2 effectively fuses multi-scale representations, thereby enhancing the robustness of the classification. We evaluated our model on a five-fold stratified cross-validation strategy on two publicly available datasets: CRC-VAL-HE-7K and NCT-CRC-HE-100K. The proposed model achieved remarkable average Precision, recall, F1-score, AUC, and test accuracy were 0.9884 plus-minus 0.0151, 0.9900 plus-minus 0.0151, 0.9900 plus-minus 0.0145, 0.9999 plus-minus 0.00006, and 0.9905 plus-minus 0.0025 on the 7K dataset. On the 100K dataset, they were 0.9904 plus-minus 0.0091, 0.9900 plus-minus 0.0071, 0.9900 plus-minus 0.0071, 0.9997 plus-minus 0.00016, and 0.9902 plus-minus 0.0006. Additionally, Grad-CAM visualizations were incorporated to enhance model interpretability by highlighting tissue areas that are medically relevant. These findings validate that MSRANetV2 is a reliable, interpretable, and high-performing architectural model for classifying CRC tissues.

eess.IV

UEFI Vulnerability Signature Generation using Static and Symbolic Analysis

Since its major release in 2006, the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) has become the industry standard for interfacing a computer's hardware and operating system, replacing BIOS. UEFI has higher privileged security access to system resources than any other software component, including the system kernel. Hence, identifying and characterizing vulnerabilities in UEFI is extremely important for computer security. However, automated detection and characterization of UEFI vulnerabilities is a challenging problem. Static vulnerability analysis techniques are scalable but lack precision (reporting many false positives), whereas symbolic analysis techniques are precise but are hampered by scalability issues due to path explosion and the cost of constraint solving. In this paper, we introduce a technique called STatic Analysis guided Symbolic Execution (STASE), which integrates both analysis approaches to leverage their strengths and minimize their weaknesses. We begin with a rule-based static vulnerability analysis on LLVM bitcode to identify potential vulnerability targets for symbolic execution. We then focus symbolic execution on each target to achieve precise vulnerability detection and signature generation. STASE relies on the manual specification of reusable vulnerability rules and attacker-controlled inputs. However, it automates the generation of harnesses that guide the symbolic execution process, addressing the usability and scalability of symbolic execution, which typically requires manual harness generation to reduce the state space. We implemented and applied STASE to the implementations of UEFI code base. STASE detects and generates vulnerability signatures for 5 out of 9 recently reported PixieFail vulnerabilities and 13 new vulnerabilities in Tianocore's EDKII codebase.

cs.CR

Rare-Seed Generation for Fuzzing

Starting with a random initial seed, fuzzers search for inputs that trigger bugs or vulnerabilities. However, fuzzers often fail to generate inputs for program paths guarded by restrictive branch conditions. In this paper, we show that by first identifying rare-paths in programs (i.e., program paths with path constraints that are unlikely to be satisfied by random input generation), and then, generating inputs/seeds that trigger rare-paths, one can improve the coverage of fuzzing tools. In particular, we present techniques 1) that identify rare paths using quantitative symbolic analysis, and 2) generate inputs that can explore these rare paths using path-guided concolic execution. We provide these inputs as initial seed sets to three state of the art fuzzers. Our experimental evaluation on a set of programs (that contain a lot of restrictive branch conditions) shows that the fuzzers achieve better coverage with the rare-path based seed set compared to a random initial seed.

cs.SE