Shellcode_IA32: A Dataset for Automatic Shellcode Generation

Pietro Liguori, Erfan Al-Hossami, Domenico Cotroneo, Roberto Natella, Bojan Cukic, Samira Shaikh

Abstract: We take the first step to address the task of automatically generating shellcodes, i.e., small pieces of code used as a payload in the exploitation of a software vulnerability, starting from natural language comments. We assemble and release a novel dataset (Shellcode_IA32), consisting of challenging but common assembly instructions with their natural language descriptions. We experiment with standard methods in neural machine translation (NMT) to establish baseline performance levels on this task.