Buffer overflow attacks may be today’s single most important security threat. This paper presents a new approach to mitigating buffer overflow vulnerabilities by detecting likely vulnerabilities through an analysis of the program source code. Our approach exploits information provided in semantic comments and uses lightweight and efficient static analyses. This paper describes an implementation of our approach that extends the LCLint annotation-assisted static checking tool.

Our tool is as fast as a compiler and nearly as easy to use. We present experience using our approach to detect buffer overflow vulnerabilities in two security-sensitive programs. Buffer overflow attacks are an important and persistent security problem. Buffer overflows account for approximately half of all security vulnerabilities [CWPBW00, WFBA00]. Richard Pethia of CERT identified buffer overflow attacks as the single most im- portant security problem at a recent software engineering conference [Pethia00]; Brian Snow of the NSA predicted that buffer overflow attacks would still be a problem in twenty years [Snow99].

Download pdf Statically Detecting Likely Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities