Analyzing Programs for Vulnerability to Bu er Overrun Attacks

This paper presents an approach for analyzing security-critical software for vulnerability to bu er overrun attacks. In practice, bu er overruns are a commonly exploited attack against security-critical software systems. Bu er overrun attacks are made possible by aws in designing and implementing software. This paper describes a software analysis tool that dynamically analyzes software source code to determine the potential to successfully overrun program bu ers in order to execute arbitrary system commands. The methodology employs software fault injection to insert malicious strings into potentially vulnerable bu ers during execution. If the bu er overrun attack is successful, arbitrary code can be executed at the whim of the attacker on the host system. Programs that are found to be vulnerable can be forti ed to prevent bu er overrun attacks from being successful in the eld. Three new algorithms for bu er overrun analysis are presented.