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FV8: A Forced Execution JavaScript Engine for Detecting Evasive Techniques

Introduction

FV8 (pronounced "favourite") is a specialized version of the V8 engine, enhanced with unique capabilities. FV8 integrates patches from VisibleV8 along with its own custom patches to deliver a powerful tool for code analysis and execution.

Key Features

  • Forced Execution: FV8 can force-execute code under specific conditions. This capability is crucial for increasing code coverage, allowing deeper analysis, and uncovering hidden or malicious code that would otherwise remain undetected.
  • Enhanced Code Coverage: By forcing the execution of more code paths, FV8 enhances the visibility into the code's behavior, making it an invaluable tool for security researchers and developers.

Usage

a) Using FV8 Directly

You can use FV8 directly by installing the .deb file of the browser and running it as a normal Chromium browser. The .deb file can be found in FV8/deb_files.

Example usage:

chromium-browser-stable --headless --no-sandbox --disable-gpu --disable-features=NetworkService --js-flags='--no-lazy' https://google.com

  • --js-flags is used to pass options directly to V8 instead of passing options to Chromium.
  • --headless can be removed if you are not executing the browser in a non-visual environment.

b) Building V8 Yourself

You can build V8 yourself starting from Chromium/V8 and apply our FV8 patches.

The /patches directory contains the patches of FV8 that can be applied to the base V8 version. Link to the base V8 version V8-base.

Example command:

patch -p1 <patches/$LAST_FV8_PATCH_FILE

c) Running the FV8 Crawler to visit websites

To visit topX Tranco URLs:

Install the required packages:

pip install -r ./scripts/requirements.txt
export DOCKER_BUILDKIT=0
python ./scripts/vv8-cli.py setup

Visit the URLs by running the Python script:

python crawler_queue_tranco.py

This script visits websites using the FV8 browser.

Reference links:

  1. VisibleV8

Research Papers

You can read more about the details of our work in the following research papers:

  1. FV8: A Forced Execution JavaScript Engine for Detecting Evasive Techniques [PDF]

If you use FV8 in your research, consider citing our work using this Bibtex entry (link to be updated upon Usenix proceedings):

@misc{pantelaios2024fv8,
      title={FV8: A Forced Execution JavaScript Engine for Detecting Evasive Techniques}, 
      author={Nikolaos Pantelaios and Alexandros Kapravelos},
      year={2024},
      eprint={2405.13175},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={id='cs.CR' full_name='Cryptography and Security' is_active=True alt_name=None in_archive='cs' is_general=False description='Covers all areas of cryptography and security including authentication, public key cryptosytems, proof-carrying code, etc. Roughly includes material in ACM Subject Classes D.4.6 and E.3.'}
}
  1. VisibleV8: In-browser Monitoring of JavaScript in the Wild [PDF]
    Jordan Jueckstock, Alexandros Kapravelos
    Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), 2019

If you use VisibleV8 in your research, consider citing our work using this Bibtex entry:

@conference{vv8-imc19,
  title = {{VisibleV8: In-browser Monitoring of JavaScript in the Wild}},
  author = {Jueckstock, Jordan and Kapravelos, Alexandros},
  booktitle = {{Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC)}},
  year = {2019}
}

License:

This project is offered under the MIT License (See License Tab)