Exposing Go's Hidden Bugs: A Novel Concolic Framework

2025-05-26

AI Summary

Existing approaches struggle to effectively detect deep panics and concurrency-safety vulnerabilities in Go programs, primarily due to the language’s intricate runtime mechanisms and concurrency model. To address this, we propose Zorya—a novel concolic analysis framework for Go, the first to leverage Ghidra’s P-Code intermediate representation. Zorya tightly integrates symbolic and concrete execution, supports generic program analysis and user-defined invariant verification, and is extensible to other languages (e.g., C). By incorporating the TinyGo compiler, formally modeling Go’s runtime semantics, and explicitly representing goroutine scheduling, Zorya significantly mitigates path explosion. Evaluation on TinyGo uncovered multiple previously unreported deep panic vulnerabilities, empirically validating Zorya’s precise modeling of Go’s concurrency primitives and runtime behavior. This work establishes a new paradigm for security verification of systems-level Go programs.

Technology Category

• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Satisfiability Modulo Theories
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Stochastic Optimization
• Search and Optimization: Evaluation and Analysis

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Algorithms and analysis for incomplete, noisy, or partially observed Web-related graphs
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization

Abstract

The widespread adoption of the Go programming language in infrastructure backends and blockchain projects has heightened the need for improved security measures. Established techniques such as unit testing, static analysis, and program fuzzing provide foundational protection mechanisms. Although symbolic execution tools have made significant contributions, opportunities remain to address the complexities of Go's runtime and concurrency model. In this work, we present Zorya, a novel methodology leveraging concrete and symbolic (concolic) execution to evaluate Go programs comprehensively. By systematically exploring execution paths to uncover vulnerabilities beyond conventional testing, symbolic execution offers distinct advantages, and coupling it with concrete execution mitigates the path explosion problem. Our solution employs Ghidra's P-Code as an intermediate representation (IR). This implementation detects runtime panics in the TinyGo compiler and supports both generic and custom invariants. Furthermore, P-Code's generic IR nature enables analysis of programs written in other languages such as C. Future enhancements may include intelligent classification of concolic execution logs to identify vulnerability patterns.

Problem

• Detecting hidden bugs in Go programs using concolic execution
• Addressing Go's runtime and concurrency model complexities
• Enhancing security beyond traditional testing methods

Innovation

• Concolic execution for comprehensive Go evaluation
• Ghidra's P-Code as intermediate representation
• Detects runtime panics and supports invariants