Abstract
Software vulnerabilities are bugs in a program that an attacker can exploit to make the program deviate from its specification. An attacker exploits a vulnerability by crafting input that causes the program to behave incorrectly. Such an input is called an exploit. This article deals with diagnosing exploits, i.e., given an exploit, the task is to return the vulnerability that allowed it. We show that existing software diagnosis algorithms are ill-suited for this problem, and introduce two novel techniques for adapting them to this problem. This includes manipulating an automated testing tool to generate additional inputs that are similar to the given exploit, and tracing below the desired granularity level to improve diagnostic accuracy. Experimental evaluation on real exploits from four open-source projects shows that our algorithm significantly reduces diagnostic efforts.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 8970609 |
| Pages (from-to) | 7-15 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | IEEE Intelligent Systems |
| Volume | 35 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 1 Nov 2020 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2001-2011 IEEE.
Funding
Roni Stern is a senior lecturer with Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, Israel and a principal scientist in Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, USA. He received the Ph.D. degree from Ben Gurion University and a postdoctoral fellowship from Harvard University. He is the former president of the International Symposium on Combinatorial Search and is a Senior Program Committee and Program Committee in top AI conferences, such as AAAI, IJCAI, AAMAS, and ICAPS. Contact him at [email protected].
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Ben Gurion University | |
| Harvard University |