Exploitable or Not Exploitable? Using REVEN to Examine a NULL Pointer Dereference.
Summary: Cisco Talos researcher Aleksandar Nikolic used the Tetrane REVEN reverse-engineering platform to trace a NULL-pointer dereference crash back through its execution path, finding the NULL in ecx originated from an `xor ecx,ecx` that initialized an object field in the constructor at sequence 23067860. The field was never assigned a real value before being dereferenced near sequence 24773092, so the value could not be controlled and the bug was judged not exploitable.
What's compelling: Fuzzing produces many NULL-pointer dereference crashes that are usually useless, but occasionally one sits close enough to a call that controlling a register like ecx would mean arbitrary code execution - and telling the two apart is what consumes analyst time.
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