Mitigating Vulnerabilities in Closed Source Software

EAI Endorsed Transactions on Security and Safety

article

Zhen Huang¹  Gang Tan²  Xiaowei Yu¹ 

[1] School of Computing, DePaul University;School of EECS, Pennsylvania State University, University Park

关键词: Software vulnerability;    vulnerability mitigation;    program analysis;    binary rewriting;   

DOI  :  10.4108/eetss.v8i30.253

学科分类：口腔科学

来源: Bern Open Publishing

【 摘 要 】

Many techniques have been proposed to harden programs with protection mechanisms to defend againstvulnerability exploits. Unfortunately the vast majority of them cannot be applied to closed source softwarebecause they require access to program source code. This paper presents our work on automatically hardeningbinary code with security workarounds, a protection mechanism that prevents vulnerabilities from beingtriggered by disabling vulnerable code. By working solely with binary code, our approach is applicableto closed source software. To automatically synthesize security workarounds, we develop binary programanalysis techniques to identify existing error handling code in binary code, synthesize security workaroundsin the form of binary code, and instrument security workarounds into binary programs. We designed andimplemented a prototype or our approach for Windows and Linux binary programs. Our evaluation showsthat our approach can apply security workarounds to an average of 69.3% of program code and the securityworkarounds successfully prevents exploits to trigger real-world vulnerabilities.

【 授权许可】

CC BY