Hardening COTS software with generic software wrappers

Fraser, Timothy; Badger, Lee; Feldman, Michael B.

doi:10.1109/fits.2003.1264946

Cited by 34 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Analogously, in [7] wrappers are used, among other things, to transparently encrypt local files accessed by library calls. However, distributed environments are not taken into account.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Formally-Based Black-Box Monitoring of Security Protocols

Pironti

Jürjens

2010

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. In the challenge of ensuring the correct behaviour of legacy implementations of security protocols, a formally-based approach is presented to design and implement monitors that stop insecure protocol runs executed by such legacy implementations, without the need of their source code. We validate the approach at a case study about monitoring several SSL legacy implementations. Recently, a security bug has been found in the widely deployed OpenSSL client; our case study shows that our monitor correctly stops the protocol runs otherwise allowed by the faulty OpenSSL client. Moreover, our monitoring approach allowed us to detect a new flaw in another open source SSL client implementation.

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“…Analogously, in [7] wrappers are used, among other things, to transparently encrypt local files accessed by library calls. However, distributed environments are not taken into account.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Formally-Based Black-Box Monitoring of Security Protocols

Pironti

Jürjens

2010

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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“…As an alternative to modifying the involved components an attractive alternative is to add new components "wrapping" the original component [Fraser et al, 1999;Ghosh et al, 1999;Mitchem et al, 2000]. Such wrappers can be added where needed and thus be applied on a policy basis or where likely to be most effective [Hiller et al, 2002a].…”

Section: Robustness Enhancing Wrappersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Robustness Evaluation of Operating Systems

Johansson

2008

Information Assurance

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SummaryThe premise behind this thesis is the observation that Operating Systems (OS), being the foundation behind operations of computing systems, are complex entities and also subject to failures. Consequently, when they do fail, the impact is the loss of system service and the applications running thereon. While a multitude of sources for OS failures exist, device drivers are often identified as a prominent cause behind failures.In order to characterize the impact of driver failures, at both the OS and application levels, this thesis develops a framework for error propagation-based robustness profiling for an OS. The framework is first developed conceptually and then experimentally validated on a real OS, namely Windows CE .Net. The choice of Windows CE is driven by its representativeness for a multitude of OS's, as well as the ability to customize the OS components for particular needs.For experimental validation, fault injection is a prominent technique that can be used to simulate faults (or errors) in the system by inserting synthetic ones and study their effect. Three key questions with such a technique are where, what and when to inject faults. This thesis shows how injecting errors at the interface between drivers and the OS can be very effective in evaluating the effects driver faults can have.To quantify the OS's robustness, this thesis defines a series of error propagation measures, specifically tailored for device drivers. These measures allow for quantifying and comparing both individual services and device drivers on their susceptibility and diffusing abilities.This thesis compares three contemporary error models on their suitability for robustness evaluation. The classical bit-flip model is found to identify a higher number of severe failures in the system. It also identifies failures for more services than both other models, data type and fuzzing. However, its main drawback is that it requires substantially more injections than the other two. Fuzzing, even though not giving rise to as many failures is able to find new additional services with severe failures.A careful study of the injections performed with the bit-flip model shows that only a few bits are generally useful for identifying new services with robustness weaknesses. Consequently, a new composite model is proposed, combining the most effective bits of the bit-flip model with the fuzzing model's ability to identify new services, giving rise to new model without loss of important information and at the same time incurring a moderate number of injections.To answer the question of when to inject an error this thesis proposes a novel model of a driver's usage profile, focusing on high-level operations being carried out. It guides the injection of errors to instances when the driver is carrying out specific operations. Results from extensive fault injection experiments show that more service vulnerabilities can be discovered. Furthermore, a priori profiling of the drivers can show how effective the proposed approach will be. vi

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“…To accomplish this, they rely on ptrace (2), the /proc file system, and/or special shared libraries. Another category of systems, such as Tron [9], SubDomain [12] and others [18,20,36,30,37,28,32], go a step further. They intercept system calls inside the kernel, and use policy engines to decide whether to permit the call or not.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

SQLrand: Preventing SQL Injection Attacks

Boyd

Keromytis

2004

Applied Cryptography and Network Security

278

150

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Abstract. We present a practical protection mechanism against SQL injection attacks. Such attacks target databases that are accessible through a web frontend, and take advantage of flaws in the input validation logic of Web components such as CGI scripts. We apply the concept of instruction-set randomization to SQL, creating instances of the language that are unpredictable to the attacker. Queries injected by the attacker will be caught and terminated by the database parser. We show how to use this technique with the MySQL database using an intermediary proxy that translates the random SQL to its standard language. Our mechanism imposes negligible performance overhead to query processing and can be easily retrofitted to existing systems.

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Hardening COTS software with generic software wrappers

Cited by 34 publications

References 18 publications

Formally-Based Black-Box Monitoring of Security Protocols

Formally-Based Black-Box Monitoring of Security Protocols

Robustness Evaluation of Operating Systems

SQLrand: Preventing SQL Injection Attacks

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