Towards Model Checking Security of Real Time Java Software

Spalazzi, Luca; Spegni, Francesco; Liva, Giovanni; Pinzger, Martin

doi:10.1109/hpcs.2018.00106

Cited by 5 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…In order to avoid race conditions, the current toolchest of developers includes a number of instruments, techniques and methods, such as thread-safe libraries, process and thread synchronization methods, library functions that are guaranteed to operate atomically eliminating any TOCTOU-based errors [85] (e.g., the introduction of the faccess function enables the use of the secure fopen/faccess function sequence instead of the TOCTOU-vulnerable access/fopen function sequence). The exploitation of experience gained from operating system and parallel application development, coupled with the use of model-based checking tools such as [93][94][95], which are able to follow all possible application execution paths and more thoroughly cover the possible instruction interleaving sequences, may lead to a reduction of race condition introduction windows.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We also plan to consider the combined assessment of results concerning communication protocol security through relevant simulation-based tools (e.g., Scyther) on the one hand (e.g., [99][100][101]), and results from the software implementation security assessment on the other hand, towards the computation of a comprehensive risk level of 5G and smart grid systems. Finally, the effectiveness of model-based checking tools such as [93][94][95] in the identification of security-related issues, and the interplay between secure software development practices and the operation of forensics in the domain of 5G and Smart Grid computing [107] will be studied.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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On the Design of IoT Security: Analysis of Software Vulnerabilities for Smart Grids

et al. 2021

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The 5G communication network will underpin a vast number of new and emerging services, paving the way for unprecedented performance and capabilities in mobile networks. In this setting, the Internet of Things (IoT) will proliferate, and IoT devices will be included in many 5G application contexts, including the Smart Grid. Even though 5G technology has been designed by taking security into account, design provisions may be undermined by software-rooted vulnerabilities in IoT devices that allow threat actors to compromise the devices, demote confidentiality, integrity and availability, and even pose risks for the operation of the power grid critical infrastructures. In this paper, we assess the current state of the vulnerabilities in IoT software utilized in smart grid applications from a source code point of view. To that end, we identified and analyzed open-source software that is used in the power grid and the IoT domain that varies in characteristics and functionality, ranging from operating systems to communication protocols, allowing us to obtain a more complete view of the vulnerability landscape. The results of this study can be used in the domain of software development, to enhance the security of produced software, as well as in the domain of automated software testing, targeting improvements to vulnerability detection mechanisms, especially with a focus on the reduction of false positives.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Design of IoT Security: Analysis of Software Vulnerabilities for Smart Grids

et al. 2021

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“…First of all, one of the strengths of the methodology, i.e., the fact that the user can specify the abstraction predicates using a high-level language, proves itself helpful to model check the correctness of the algorithms . In the considered case studies, we already knew which bugs were present and we used such knowledge as a validation mechanism for testing the correct implementation of the tool (Spalazzi et al 2018;Liva et al 2018). In Fisher's algorithm, we also benefit from being able to test different encodings of the same mutual exclusion requirement.…”

Section: Experimental Validationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A previous version of this work (Spalazzi et al 2018) showed some core components of our approach. In this work, we extend the translation rules, we prove the soundness of the produced network of timed automata, and we apply it to more software projects.…”

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confidence: 99%

Verifying temporal specifications of Java programs

et al. 2020

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Many Java programs encode temporal behaviors in their source code, typically mixing three features provided by the Java language: (1) pausing the execution for a limited amount of time, (2) waiting for an event that has to occur before a deadline expires, and (3) comparing timestamps. In this work, we show how to exploit modern SMT solvers together with static analysis in order to produce a network of timed automata approximating the temporal behavior of a set of Java threads. We also prove that the presented abstraction preserves the truth of MTL and ATCTL formulae, two well-known logics for expressing timed specifications. As far as we know, this is the first feasible approach enabling the user to automatically model check timed specifications of Java software directly from the source code.

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“…Modern programming languages, such as Java, C, and C#, offer APIs to manipulate and model time as timestamp using integer variables. Recent works [21], [22], [23] show how the timestamp representation is fragile in the context of mainstream programming languages. Integer Overflows due to manipulation of timestamps could be dangerous and exploited to violate the security offered by modern operating systems.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic Repair of Timestamp Comparisons

Liva

Khan

Pinzger

et al. 2021

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

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Automated program repair has the potential to reduce the developers' effort to fix errors in their code. In particular, modern programming languages, such as Java, C, and C#, represent time as integer variables that suffer from integer overflow, introducing subtle errors that are hard to discover and repair. Recent researches on automated program repair rely on test cases to discover failures to correct, making them suitable only for regression errors. We propose a new strategy to automatically repair programs that suffer from timestamp overflows that are manifested in comparison expressions. It unifies the benefits of static analysis and automatic program repair avoiding to depend on testing to identify and correct defected code. Our approach performs an abstract analysis over the time domain of a program using a Time Type System to identify the problematic comparison expressions. The repairing strategy rewrites the timestamp comparisons exploiting the binary representation of machine numbers to correct the code. We have validated the applicability of our approach with 20 open source Java projects. The results show that it is able to correctly repair all 246 identified errors. Furthermore, several patches for three open source projects have been acknowledged and accepted by their developers.

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Towards Model Checking Security of Real Time Java Software

Cited by 5 publications

References 17 publications

On the Design of IoT Security: Analysis of Software Vulnerabilities for Smart Grids

On the Design of IoT Security: Analysis of Software Vulnerabilities for Smart Grids

Verifying temporal specifications of Java programs

Automatic Repair of Timestamp Comparisons

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