Crystallizer: A Hybrid Path Analysis Framework to Aid in Uncovering Deserialization Vulnerabilities

Applications use serialization and deserialization to exchange data. Serialization allows developers to exchange messages or perform remote method invocation in distributed applications. However, the application logic itself is responsible for security. Adversaries may abuse bugs in the deserialization logic to forcibly invoke attackercontrolled methods by crafting malicious bytestreams (payloads).

Crystallizer presents a novel hybrid framework to automatically uncover deserialization vulnerabilities by combining static and dynamic analyses. Our intuition is to first over-approximate possible payloads through static analysis (to constrain the search space). Then, we use dynamic analysis to instantiate concrete payloads as a proof-of-concept of a vulnerability (giving the analyst concrete examples of possible attacks). Our proof-of-concept focuses on Java deserialization as the imminent domain of such attacks.

We evaluate our prototype on seven popular Java libraries against state-of-the-art frameworks for uncovering gadget chains. In contrast to existing tools, we uncovered 41 previously unknown exploitable chains. Furthermore, we show the real-world security impact of Crystallizer by using it to synthesize gadget chains to mount RCE and DoS attacks on three popular Java applications. We have responsibly disclosed all newly discovered vulnerabilities.