Detecting Format-String Vulnerabilities with Type Qualifiers

From: aleph1at_private
Date: Sat Sep 15 2001 - 15:50:44 PDT

  • Next message: Kernel|X|: "advisory"

    Detecting Format-String Vulnerabilities with Type Qualifiers
    Umesh Shankar, Kunal Talwar, Jeffrey S. Foster, and David Wagner
    
    We present a new system for automatically detecting format string security 
    vulnerabilities in C programs using a constraint-based type-inference engine. 
    We describe new techniques for presenting the results of such analysis to 
    the user in a form that makes bugs easier to find and fix, The system has 
    been implemented and tested on several real-world software packages. Our 
    tests show that the system is very effective, detecting several bugs 
    previously unknown to the authors and exhibiting a low rate of false 
    positives in almost all cases. Many of our techniques are applicable to 
    additional classes of security vulnerabilities, as well as other type- and 
    constraint- based systems.
    
    http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jfoster/papers/usenix01.ps.gz
    http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jfoster/papers/usenix01.pdf
    
    -- 
    Elias Levy
    SecurityFocus
    http://www.securityfocus.com/
    Si vis pacem, para bellum
    



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sun Sep 16 2001 - 17:12:54 PDT