An experimental study of security vulnerabilities caused by errors (original) (raw)

Proceedings International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks

This paper presents an experimental study which shows that, for the Intel x86 architecture, single-bit control flow errors in the authentication sections of targeted applications can result in significant security vulnerabilities. The experiment targets two well-known Internet server applications: FTP and SSH (secure shell), injecting single-bit control flow errors into user authentication sections of the applications. The injected sections constitute approximately 2-8% of the text segment of the target applications. The results show that out of all activated errors (a) 1-2% compromised system security (create a permanent window of vulnerability), (b) 43-62% resulted in crash failures (about 8.5% of these errors create a transient window of vulnerability), and (c) 7-12% resulted in fail silence violations. A key reason for the measured security vulnerabilities is that, in the x86 architecture, conditional branch instructions are a minimum of one Hamming distance apart. The design and evaluation of a new encoding scheme that reduces or eliminates this problem is presented.