Agentic Vulnerability Reasoning on Windows COM Binaries

TL;DR

SLYP is a comprehensive tool pipeline that effectively discovers race condition vulnerabilities in Windows COM binaries and autonomously generates verified proof-of-concept exploits, outperforming existing methods.

Contribution

Introduces SLYP, an end-to-end agentic system that combines static and dynamic analysis to find vulnerabilities and generate verified PoCs in COM binaries, with high accuracy and real-world impact.

Findings

SLYP achieves 0.973 F1 in vulnerability detection on benchmark.

SLYP autonomously synthesizes PoCs for 67.5% of cases.

Discovered 28 new vulnerabilities in production Windows services, confirmed by MSRC.

Abstract

Windows Component Object Model (COM) services run with elevated privileges and are widely accessible to authenticated users, making race conditions in these binaries a critical surface for local privilege escalation. We present SLYP, an end-to-end agentic pipeline that discovers race condition vulnerabilities in COM binaries and generates debugger-verified proof-of-concept (PoC) code. SLYP exposes binary exploration, COM inspection, and dynamic debugging as reusable tool interfaces, giving agents the static context, COM activation metadata, and debugger feedback needed to move from vulnerability discovery to verified PoC generation. On a benchmark of 20 COM objects covering 40 vulnerability cases, SLYP achieves 0.973 F1, outperforming production coding agents by up to 0.208 F1 and the state-of-the-art static analyzer by 3.3x in bug discovery. For PoC generation, production coding agents in their default setup (without our COM inspection and dynamic debugging tools) verify essentially no cases on either frontier model, whereas SLYP's interactive toolsets enable it to autonomously synthesize working PoCs for 67.5% of cases on the strongest configuration. Deployed on production Windows services, SLYP discovers 28 previously unknown vulnerabilities across nine COM services, all confirmed by the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) with 16 CVEs assigned and $140,000 in bounties. Furthermore, SLYP is designed with generalizable binary analysis and debugging interfaces, making it readily applicable to other commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) binaries beyond Windows COM services.