When Memory Corruption Met Concurrency: Vulnerabilities in Concurrent Programs

Preventing exploits against memory corruption vulnerabilities

Detecting concurrency anomalies in transactional memory programs

Concurrent programs may suffer from concurrency anomalies that may lead to erroneous and unpredictable program behaviors. To ensure program correctness, these anomalies must be diagnosed and corrected. This paper addresses the detection of both lowand high-level anomalies in the Transactional Memory setting. We propose a static analysis procedure and a framework to address Transactional Memory ...

Exploiting Concurrency Vulnerabilities in System Call Wrappers

System call interposition allows the kernel security model to be extended. However, when combined with current operating systems, it is open to concurrency vulnerabilities leading to privilege escalation and audit bypass. We discuss the theory and practice of system call wrapper concurrency vulnerabilities, and demonstrate exploit techniques against GSWTK, Systrace, and CerbNG.

Verifying Concurrent Programs by Memory Unwinding

We describe a new sequentialization-based approach to the symbolic verification of multithreaded programs with shared memory and dynamic thread creation. Its main novelty is the idea of memory unwinding (MU), i.e., a sequence of write operations into the shared memory. For the verification, we nondeterministically guess an MU and then simulate the behavior of the program according to any schedu...

Memory Distance Measurement for Concurrent Programs

Memory distance analysis, the number of unique memory references made between two accesses to the same memory location, is an effective method to measure data locality and predict memory behavior. Many existing methods on memory distance measurement and analysis consider sequential programs only. With the trend towards concurrent programming, it is necessary to study the impact of memory distan...