Next: 1 Introduction
Detecting Format String Vulnerabilities with Type
Qualifiers1
Umesh Shankar
Kunal Talwar
Jeffrey S. Foster
David Wagner
{ushankar,kunal,jfoster,daw}@cs.berkeley.edu
University of California at Berkeley
Abstract:
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 an analysis to the user in a form that makes bugs
easier to find and to 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.
Umesh Shankar
2001-05-16