Finding trojan message vulnerabilities in distributed systems
Radu Banabic, George Candea, Rachid Guerraoui · 2014
Trojan messages are messages that seem correct to the receiver but cannot be generated by any correct sender. Such messages constitute major vulnerability points of a distributed system---they constitute ideal targets for a malicious actor and facilitate failure propagation across nodes. We describe Achilles, a tool that searches for Trojan messages in a distributed system. Achilles uses dynamic white-box analysis on the distributed system binaries in order to infer the predicate that defines messages parsed by receiver nodes and generated by sender nodes, respectively, and then computes Trojan messages as the difference between the two.