Static Security Analysis Based on Input-Related Software Faults

It is important to focus on security aspects during the development cycle to deliver reliable software. However, locating security faults in complex systems is difficult and there are only a few effective automatic tools available to help developers. In this paper we present an approach to help deve...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:2009 13th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering pp. 37 - 46
Main Authors: Nagy, C., Mancoridis, S.
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: IEEE 01.03.2009
Subjects:
Buffer overflow
Computer security
Data security
Fault diagnosis
Open source software
Performance analysis
security analysis
Software algorithms
Software engineering
Software maintenance
Software systems
static analysis
ISBN:1424437555, 0769535895, 9781424437559, 9780769535890
ISSN:1534-5351
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:It is important to focus on security aspects during the development cycle to deliver reliable software. However, locating security faults in complex systems is difficult and there are only a few effective automatic tools available to help developers. In this paper we present an approach to help developers locate vulnerabilities by marking parts of the source code that involve user input. We focus on input-related code, since an attacker can usually take advantage of vulnerabilities by passing malformed input to the application. The main contributions of this work are two metrics to help locate faults during a code review, and algorithms to locate buffer overflow and format string vulnerabilities in C source code. We implemented our approach as a plug in to the Grammatech CodeSurfer tool. We tested and validated our technique on open source projects and we found faults in software that includes Pidgin and cyrus-imapd.
ISBN:1424437555
0769535895
9781424437559
9780769535890
ISSN:1534-5351
DOI:10.1109/CSMR.2009.51