A First Step Towards Automated Detection of Buffer Overrun Vulnerabilities

David Wagner, Jeffrey S. Foster, Eric A. Brewer, and Alexander Aiken (UC Berkley)

We describe a new technique for finding potential buffer overrun vulnerabilities in security-critical C code. The key to success is to use static analysis: we formulate detection of buffer overruns as an integer range analysis problem. One major advantage of static analysis is that security bugs can be eliminated before code is deployed. We have implemented our design and used our prototype to find new remotely-exploitable vulnerabilities in a large, widely deployed software package. An earlier hand audit missed these bugs.

Date: 3 Feb 2000

Associated Event: NDSS Symposium 2000