Insu Yun

Taesoo Kim, HyungSeok Han, Soyeon Park et al.

We present ATLANTIS, the cyber reasoning system developed by Team Atlanta that won 1st place in the Final Competition of DARPA's AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) at DEF CON 33 (August 2025). AIxCC (2023-2025) challenged teams to build autonomous cyber reasoning systems capable of discovering and patching vulnerabilities at the speed and scale of modern software. ATLANTIS integrates large language models (LLMs) with program analysis -- combining symbolic execution, directed fuzzing, and static analysis -- to address limitations in automated vulnerability discovery and program repair. Developed by researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology, Samsung Research, KAIST, and POSTECH, the system addresses core challenges: scaling across diverse codebases from C to Java, achieving high precision while maintaining broad coverage, and producing semantically correct patches that preserve intended behavior. We detail the design philosophy, architectural decisions, and implementation strategies behind ATLANTIS, share lessons learned from pushing the boundaries of automated security when program analysis meets modern AI, and release artifacts to support reproducibility and future research.

Insu Yun, Dhaval Kapil, Taesoo Kim

Heap exploitation techniques to abuse the metadata of allocators have been widely studied since they are application independent and can be used in restricted environments that corrupt only metadata. Although prior work has found several interesting exploitation techniques, they are ad-hoc and manual, which cannot effectively handle changes or a variety of allocators. In this paper, we present a new naming scheme for heap exploitation techniques that systematically organizes them to discover the unexplored space in finding the techniques and ArcHeap, the tool that finds heap exploitation techniques automatically and systematically regardless of their underlying implementations. For that, ArcHeap generates a set of heap actions (e.g. allocation or deallocation) by leveraging fuzzing, which exploits common designs of modern heap allocators. Then, ArcHeap checks whether the actions result in impact of exploitations such as arbitrary write or overlapped chunks that efficiently determine if the actions can be converted into the exploitation technique. Finally, from these actions, ArcHeap generates Proof-of-Concept code automatically for an exploitation technique. We evaluated ArcHeap with real-world allocators --- ptmalloc, jemalloc, and tcmalloc --- and custom allocators from the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge. ArcHeap successfully found 14 out of 16 known exploitation techniques and found five new exploitation techniques in ptmalloc. Moreover, ArcHeap found several exploitation techniques for jemalloc, tcmalloc, and even for the custom allocators. Further, ArcHeap can automatically show changes in exploitation techniques along with version change in ptmalloc using differential testing.