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Security '01 Abstract
Detecting Format String Vulnerabilities with Type Qualifiers
Umesh Shankar, Kunal Talwar, Jeffrey S. Foster and David Wagner, University of California at Berkeley
Abstract
We present a new system for automatically detecting format string
security vulnerabilities in C programs using a constraint-based
type-inference engine. We describe new techniques for presenting the
results of such an analysis to the user in a form that makes bugs
easier to find and to fix. The system has been implemented and tested
on several real-world software packages. Our tests show that the
system is very effective, detecting several bugs previously unknown to
the authors and exhibiting a low rate of false positives in almost all
cases. Many of our techniques are applicable to additional classes of
security vulnerabilities, as well as other type- and constraint-based
systems.
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