A methodology for the automated identification of buffer overflow vulnerabilities in executable software without source-code

Authors

Abstract

This paper presents a methodology for the automated detection of buffer overflow vulnerabilities in executable software. Buffer overflow exploitation has been used by hackers to breach security or simply to crash computer systems. The mere presence inside the software code of a vulnerability that allows for buffer overflow exploitations presents a serious risk. So far, all methodologies devised to mitigate this problem assume source code availability or prior knowledge on vulnerable functions. Our methodology removes this dependency and allows the analysis of executable code without any knowledge about its internal structure. This independence is fundamental for relevant scenarios such as COTS selection during system integration (for which source code is usually not available), and the definition of attackloads for dependability benchmarking.

Subject

Computer security

Conference

Second Latin-American Symposium on Dependable Computing, LADC, October 2005