Computer Vulnerability Analysis (original) (raw)

An analysis of some software vulnerabilities

1998

Abstract Many engineering fields have recognized the need to analyze past mistakes and failures in the hope of learning from them. In computer science this realization has resulted in the development of software testing techniques that attempt to detect known problems from software systems and in improved compilers and development tools. However, there exists a series of software failures where detailed analysis is rarely published, mainly for fear that the information could be used against active systems.

Computer Vulnerability Analysis: Thesis Proposal

1997

Computer security professionals and researchers do not have a history of sharing and analyzing computer vulnerability information. Scientists and engineers from older or more established fields have long understood that publicizing, analyzing, and learning from other people's mistakes is essential to the stepwise refinement of complex systems. Computer scientists, however, have not followed suit. Programmers reinvent classical programming mistakcs, contributing to the reappearance of known vulnerabilities. In the recent past, complltcr systems have come to be a part of critical systems that have a direct effect on the safety and well-being of human beings and hence we must have lower tolerance for software failures. In the dissedation I will attempt to show that computer vulnerability information presents important regularities and these can be detected, and possibly visualized, providing important insight about the reason of their prevalence and existence. The information deriv...

A Decade of Reoccurring Software Weaknesses

IEEE Security & Privacy

The Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) community publishes an aggregate metric to calculate the 'Most Dangerous Software Errors.' However, the used equation highly biases frequency over exploitability and impact. We provide a metric to mitigate this bias and discuss the most significant software weaknesses over the last ten years.

A Classi cation of Software Vulnerabilities That Result From Incorrect Environmental Assumptions

1998

The consequences of a class of system failures, commonly known as software vulnerabilities, violate security policies. They can cause the loss of information and reduce the value or usefulness of the system. An increased understanding of the nature of vulnerabilities, their manifestations, and the mechanisms that can be used to eliminate and prevent them can be achieved by the development of a uni ed de nition of software vulnerabilities, and the development of a framework for the creation of taxonomies for vulnerabilities. This paper provides a unifying de nition of software vulnerability based on the notion that it is security policies that de ne what is allowable or desirable in a system. It also includes a framework for the development of classi cations and taxonomies for software vulnerabilities. This paper presents a classi cation of software vulnerabilities that focuses on the assumptions that programmers make regarding the environment in which their application will be execu...

Developing Secure Software - A survey and classification of common software vulnerabilities

More and more software is deployed in an environment with wide area network connectivity, in particular with connectivity to the Internet. Software developers are not always aware of the security implications of this connectivity, and hence the software they produce contains a large number of vulnerabilities exploitable by attackers. Statistics show that a limited number of types of vulnerabilities account for the majority of successful attacks on the Internet. Hence, we believe that it is very useful for a software developer to have a deep understanding of these kinds of vulnerabilities, in order to avoid them in new software. In this paper, we present a survey and classi cation of the most commonly exploited software vulnerabilities.

Software vulnerability analysis

1998

, and many others that I wish I could name, contributed signicantly to my mental and spiritual well-being during the writing of this dissertation. Words are not su cient t o thank them. v

An experimental study of security vulnerabilities caused by errors

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.