Manticore

Manticore is a symbolic execution tool for analysis of binaries and smart contracts.

Features

• Input Generation: Manticore automatically generates inputs that trigger unique code paths
• Crash Discovery: Manticore discovers inputs that crash programs via memory safety violations
• Execution Tracing: Manticore records an instruction-level trace of execution for each generated input
• Programmatic Interface: Manticore exposes programmatic access to its analysis engine via a Python API

Manticore can analyze the following types of programs:

• Linux ELF binaries (x86, x86_64 and ARMv7)
• Ethereum smart contracts (EVM bytecode) (release announcement)

Requirements

Manticore is supported on Linux and requires Python 2.7. Ubuntu 16.04 is strongly recommended. Ethereum smart contract analysis requires the solc program in your $PATH.

Quick Start

Install and try Manticore in a few shell commands (see an asciinema):

# Install system dependencies
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install python-pip -y

# Install manticore and its dependencies
sudo pip2 install manticore

# Download and build the examples
git clone https://github.com/trailofbits/manticore.git && cd manticore/examples/linux
make

# Use the Manticore CLI
manticore basic
cat mcore_*/*0.stdin | ./basic
cat mcore_*/*1.stdin | ./basic

# Use the Manticore API
cd ../script
python count_instructions.py ../linux/helloworld

Installation

Option 1: Perform a user install (requires ~/.local/bin in your PATH).

echo "PATH=\$PATH:~/.local/bin" >> ~/.profile
source ~/.profile
pip install --user manticore

Option 2: Use a virtual environment (requires virtualenvwrapper or similar).

pip install virtualenvwrapper
echo "source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh" >> ~/.profile
source ~/.profile
mkvirtualenv manticore
pip install manticore

Option 3: Perform a system install.

sudo pip install manticore

Once installed, the manticore CLI tool and Python API will be available.

For installing a development version of Manticore, see our wiki.

Usage

CLI

Manticore has a command line interface which can be used to easily symbolically execute a supported program. Analysis results will be placed into a new directory beginning with mcore_. Solidity files must have a .sol extension.

$ manticore ./path/to/binary        # runs, and creates a mcore_* directory with analysis results
$ manticore ./path/to/binary ab cd  # use concrete strings "ab", "cd" as program arguments
$ manticore ./path/to/binary ++ ++  # use two symbolic strings of length two as program arguments
$ manticore ./path/to/contract.sol  # runs, and creates a mcore_* directory with analysis results

API

Manticore has a Python programming interface which can be used to implement custom analyses.

# example Manticore script
from manticore import Manticore

hook_pc = 0x400ca0

m = Manticore('./path/to/binary')

@m.hook(hook_pc)
def hook(state):
  cpu = state.cpu
  print 'eax', cpu.EAX
  print cpu.read_int(cpu.ESP)

  m.terminate()  # tell Manticore to stop

m.run()

Further documentation is available in several places:

• The wiki contains some basic information about getting started with manticore and contributing

• The examples directory has some very minimal examples that showcase API features

• The manticore-examples repository has some more involved examples, for instance solving real CTF problems

• The API reference has more thorough and in-depth documentation on our API

Manticore is beta software. It is actively developed and maintained, and users should expect improvements, interface changes, and of course, some bugs.