Automating Patching of Vulnerable Open-Source Software Versions in Application Binaries

Abstract

Mobile application developers rely heavily on opensource software (OSS) to offload common functionalities such as the implementation of protocols and media format playback. Over the past years, several vulnerabilities have been found in popular open-source libraries like OpenSSL and FFmpeg. Mobile applications that include such libraries inherit these flaws, which make them vulnerable. Fortunately, the open-source community is responsive and patches are made available within days. However, mobile application developers are often left unaware of these flaws. The App Security Improvement Program (ASIP) is a commendable effort by Google to notify application developers of these flaws, but recent work has shown that many developers do not act on this information. Our work addresses vulnerable mobile applications through automatic binary patching from source patches provided by the OSS maintainers and without involving the developers. We propose novel techniques to overcome difficult challenges like patching feasibility analysis, source-code-to-binary-code matching, and in-memory patching. Our technique uses a novel variabilityaware approach, which we implement as OSSPATCHER. We evaluated OSSPATCHER with 39 OSS and a collection of 1,000 Android applications using their vulnerable versions. OSSPATCHER generated 675 function-level patches that fixed the affected mobile applications without breaking their binary code. Further, we evaluated 10 vulnerabilities in popular apps such as Chrome with public exploits, which OSSPATCHER was able to mitigate and thwart their exploitation.