Detection of security vulnerabilities using guided model checking

Abstract

Software security problems are good candidates for application of verification techniques. Usually it is not a complex task to represent certain security-related property in a particular verification framework. For instance in any software model checking environment (MC)[1] it is possible to state buffer overflow detection as a reachability problem. The approach works in theory and in practice, but has a major scalability drawback: the state-space, which represents all possible behaviors of the system, might grow exponentially in the size of the product of a model and a property. From the other side MC has an important advantage - a counter-example is produced automatically when the bug is found. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.