Analyzing and Discovering Spatial Algorithm Complexity Vulnerabilities in Recursion

The algorithmic complexity vulnerability (ACV) that may lead to denial of service attacks greatly disrupts the security and availability of applications, and due to the widespread use of third-party libraries, its impact may be amplified through the software supply chain. The existing work in the fi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied sciences Vol. 14; no. 5; p. 1855
Main Authors: Wang, Ziqi, Bu, Debao, Tian, Weihan, Cui, Baojiang
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.03.2024
Subjects:
Algorithms
Analysis
Automation
call chain
Computational linguistics
Critical path
Denial of service attacks
Efficiency
Java
Language processing
Logistics
Methods
Natural language interfaces
recursion structure
Safety and security measures
Software
spatial algorithm complexity vulnerability
Third party
Web applications
Germany
ISSN:2076-3417, 2076-3417
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The algorithmic complexity vulnerability (ACV) that may lead to denial of service attacks greatly disrupts the security and availability of applications, and due to the widespread use of third-party libraries, its impact may be amplified through the software supply chain. The existing work in the field is dedicated to abstract loop or iterative patterns and fuzzing the entire application to discover algorithm complexity vulnerabilities, but they still face efficiency and effectiveness issues. Our research focuses on: (1) proposing a representation and extraction method for code features related to algorithmic complexity vulnerabilities, helping analysts quickly understand program logic; (2) providing a new ACV detecting model, focusing on the spatial complexity anomalies caused by deep recursion structures, and proposing a new filtering method; and (3) aiming at the difficulty of efficiently generating complex-data-type-related payloads using existing symbol execution techniques, a call-chain-guided payload construction method is proposed. We tested third-party components in the open-source Java Maven Repository, identified many unexposed vulnerabilities, and eight of them received Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) identifiers, and demonstrated that our method can discover more algorithmic complexity vulnerabilities compared to existing tools with better performance.
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ISSN:2076-3417
2076-3417
DOI:10.3390/app14051855