3,754 research outputs found
The Progress, Challenges, and Perspectives of Directed Greybox Fuzzing
Most greybox fuzzing tools are coverage-guided as code coverage is strongly
correlated with bug coverage. However, since most covered codes may not contain
bugs, blindly extending code coverage is less efficient, especially for corner
cases. Unlike coverage-guided greybox fuzzers who extend code coverage in an
undirected manner, a directed greybox fuzzer spends most of its time allocation
on reaching specific targets (e.g., the bug-prone zone) without wasting
resources stressing unrelated parts. Thus, directed greybox fuzzing (DGF) is
particularly suitable for scenarios such as patch testing, bug reproduction,
and specialist bug hunting. This paper studies DGF from a broader view, which
takes into account not only the location-directed type that targets specific
code parts, but also the behaviour-directed type that aims to expose abnormal
program behaviours. Herein, the first in-depth study of DGF is made based on
the investigation of 32 state-of-the-art fuzzers (78% were published after
2019) that are closely related to DGF. A thorough assessment of the collected
tools is conducted so as to systemise recent progress in this field. Finally,
it summarises the challenges and provides perspectives for future research.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figure
Generalizing Permissive-Upgrade in Dynamic Information Flow Analysis
Preventing implicit information flows by dynamic program analysis requires
coarse approximations that result in false positives, because a dynamic monitor
sees only the executed trace of the program. One widely deployed method is the
no-sensitive-upgrade check, which terminates a program whenever a variable's
taint is upgraded (made more sensitive) due to a control dependence on tainted
data. Although sound, this method is restrictive, e.g., it terminates the
program even if the upgraded variable is never used subsequently. To counter
this, Austin and Flanagan introduced the permissive-upgrade check, which allows
a variable upgrade due to control dependence, but marks the variable
"partially-leaked". The program is stopped later if it tries to use the
partially-leaked variable. Permissive-upgrade handles the dead-variable
assignment problem and remains sound. However, Austin and Flanagan develop
permissive-upgrade only for a two-point (low-high) security lattice and
indicate a generalization to pointwise products of such lattices. In this
paper, we develop a non-trivial and non-obvious generalization of
permissive-upgrade to arbitrary lattices. The key difficulty lies in finding a
suitable notion of partial leaks that is both sound and permissive and in
developing a suitable definition of memory equivalence that allows an inductive
proof of soundness
AndroShield:automated Android applications vulnerability detection, a hybrid static and dynamic analysis approach
The security of mobile applications has become a major research field which is associated with a lot of challenges. The high rate of developing mobile applications has resulted in less secure applications. This is due to what is called the “rush to release” as defined by Ponemon Institute. Security testing—which is considered one of the main phases of the development life cycle—is either not performed or given minimal time; hence, there is a need for security testing automation. One of the techniques used is Automated Vulnerability Detection. Vulnerability detection is one of the security tests that aims at pinpointing potential security leaks. Fixing those leaks results in protecting smart-phones and tablet mobile device users against attacks. This paper focuses on building a hybrid approach of static and dynamic analysis for detecting the vulnerabilities of Android applications. This approach is capsuled in a usable platform (web application) to make it easy to use for both public users and professional developers. Static analysis, on one hand, performs code analysis. It does not require running the application to detect vulnerabilities. Dynamic analysis, on the other hand, detects the vulnerabilities that are dependent on the run-time behaviour of the application and cannot be detected using static analysis. The model is evaluated against different applications with different security vulnerabilities. Compared with other detection platforms, our model detects information leaks as well as insecure network requests alongside other commonly detected flaws that harm users’ privacy. The code is available through a GitHub repository for public contribution
Protection against Code Obfuscation Attacks based on control dependencies in Android Systems
International audienceIn Android systems, an attacker can obfuscate an application code to leak sensitive information. TaintDroid is an information flow tracking system that protects private data in smartphones. But, TainDroid cannot detect control flows. Thus, it can be circumvented by an obfuscated code attack based on control dependencies. In this paper, we present a collection of obfuscated code attacks on TaintDroid system. We propose a technical solution based on a hybrid approach that combines static and dynamic analysis. We formally specify our solution based on two propagation rules. Finally, we evaluate our approach and show that we can avoid the obfuscated code attacks based on control dependencies by using these propagation rules
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