HackSim: An automation of penetration testing for remote buffer overflow vulnerabilities

Abstract

We propose an extensible exploit framework for automation of penetration testing (or pen-testing) without loss of safety and describe possible methods for sanitizing unreliable code in each part of the framework. The proposed framework plays a key role in implementing HackSim a pen-testing tool that remotely exploits known buffer-overflow vulnerabilities. Implementing our enhanced version of HackSim for Solaris and Windows systems, we show the advantages of our sanitized pen-testing tool in terms of safety compared with existing pen-testing tools and exploit frameworks. This work is stepping toward a systematic approach for substituting difficult parts of the labor-intensive pen-testing process.