Check out the new USENIX Web site.

Home About USENIX Events Membership Publications Students
Security '01 Abstract

FormatGuard: Automatic Protection From printf Format String Vulnerabilities

Crispin Cowan, Matt Barringer, Steve Beattie, and Greg Kroah-Hartman, WireX Communications, Inc.

Abstract

In June 2000, a major new class of vulnerabilities called "format bugs" was discovered when an vulnerability in WU-FTP appeared that acted almost like a buffer over-flow, but wasnÕt. Since then, dozens of format string vulnerabilities have appeared. This paper describes the format bug problem, and presents FormatGuard: our proposed solution. FormatGuard is a small patch to glibc that provides general protection against format bugs. We show that FormatGuard is effective in protect-ing several real programs with format vulnerabilities against live exploits, and we show that FormatGuard imposes minimal compatibility and performance costs.
  • View the full text of this paper in PDF and PostScript.
    The Proceedings are published as a collective work, © 2001 by the USENIX Association. All Rights Reserved. Rights to individual papers remain with the author or the author's employer. Permission is granted for the noncommercial reproduction of the complete work for educational or research purposes. USENIX acknowledges all trademarks within this paper.

  • If you need the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can download it from Adobe's site.

  • To become a USENIX Member, please see our Membership Information.

?Need help? Use our Contacts page.

Last changed: 30 Apr 2002 ml
Technical Program
Security '01 Home
USENIX home