NDLI: Automatic Generation of Assertions to Detect Potential Security Vulnerabilities in C Programs That Use Union and Pointer Types

Content Provider	IEEE Xplore Digital Library
Author	Khalid, S.K.A. Zimmermann, J. Corney, D. Fidge, C.
Copyright Year	2010
Abstract	Type unions, pointer variables and function pointers are a long standing source of subtle security bugs in C program code. Their use can lead to hard-to-diagnose crashes or exploitable vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to attain privileged access over classified data. This paper describes an automatable framework for detecting such weaknesses in C programs statically, where possible, and for generating assertions that will detect them dynamically, in other cases. Exclusively based on analysis of the source code, it identifies required assertions using a type inference system supported by a custom made symbol table. In our preliminary findings, our type system was able to infer the correct type of unions in different scopes, without manual code annotations or rewriting. Whenever an evaluation is not possible or is difficult to resolve, appropriate runtime assertions are formed and inserted into the source code. The approach is demonstrated via a prototype C analysis tool.
Starting Page	351
Ending Page	356
File Size	294716
Page Count	6
File Format	PDF
ISBN	9781424484843
DOI	10.1109/NSS.2010.63
Language	English
Publisher	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Publisher Date	2010-09-01
Publisher Place	Australia
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Rights Holder	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subject Keyword	Runtime C Instruments Linux Polymorphic types Runtime assertions Concrete Program analysis Compounds Security Kernel
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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