Techniques for Vulneability discovery

["kaipower" <kaipower () subdimension com>]

Hi,

After reading the mailing list for quite a while, there is a burning
question which I kept asking myself:

How do experts discover vulnerabilities in a system/software?

Some categories of vulnerabilities that I am aware of:
1) Buffer overflow (Stack or Heap)
2) Mal access control and Trust management
3) Cross site scripting
4) Unexpected input - e.g. SQL injection?
5) Race conditions
6) password authentication

Do people just run scripts to brute force to find vulnerabilities? (as in
the case of Buffer overflows)
Or do they do a reverse engineer of the software?

How relevant is reverse engineering in this context?

Anybody out there care to give a methodology/strategy in finding
vulnerabilities?

Mike



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