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Static Detection of Vulnerabilities in x86 Executables

Authors Marco Cova, Viktoria Felmetsger, Greg Banks, Giovanni Vigna
Venue Proceedings of the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC)
Place and Year Miami, FL, USA, December 2006
Full Paper [PDF] [IEEE Computer Society Press]

Abstract

In the last few years, several approaches have been proposed to perform vulnerability analysis of applications written in high-level languages. However, little has been done to automatically identify security-relevant flaws in binary code.

In this paper, we present a novel approach to the identification of vulnerabilities in x86 executables in ELF binary format. Our approach is based on static analysis and symbolic execution techniques. We implemented our approach in a proof-of-concept tool and used it to detect taint-style vulnerabilities in binary code. The results of our evaluation show that our approach is both practical and effective.