Statically Detecting Likely Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities

[aleph1 () securityfocus com]

Statically Detecting Likely Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities
David Larochelle and David Evans.

Buffer overflow attacks may be today's single most important security 
threat. This paper presents a new approach to mitigating buffer overflow 
vulnerabilities by detecting likely vulnerabilities through an analysis of 
the program source code. Our approach exploits information provided in 
semantic comments and uses lightweight and efficient static analyses. This 
paper describes an implementation of our approach that extends the LCLint 
annotation-assisted static checking tool. Our tool is as fast as a compiler 
and nearly as easy to use. We present experience using our approach to 
detect buffer overflow vulnerabilities in two security-sensitive programs.

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/usenix01-abstract.html
http://lclint.cs.virginia.edu/usenix01.pdf
http://lclint.cs.virginia.edu/usenix01.html

-- 
Elias Levy
SecurityFocus
http://www.securityfocus.com/
Si vis pacem, para bellum