Mitigating program security vulnerabilities: Approaches and challenges

Abstract

Programs are implemented in a variety of languages and contain serious vulnerabilities which might be exploited to cause security breaches. These vulnerabilities have been exploited in real life and caused damages to related stakeholders such as program users. As many security vulnerabilities belong to program code, many techniques have been applied to mitigate these vulnerabilities before program deployment. Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive comparative analysis of different vulnerability mitigation works. As a result, there exists an obscure mapping between the techniques, the addressed vulnerabilities, and the limitations of different approaches. This article attempts to address these issues. The work extensively compares and contrasts the existing program security vulnerability mitigation techniques, namely testing, static analysis, and hybrid analysis. We also discuss three other approaches employed to mitigate the most common program security vulnerabilities: secure programming, program transformation, and patching. The survey provides a comprehensive understanding of the current program security vulnerability mitigation approaches and challenges as well as their key characteristics and limitations. Moreover, our discussion highlights the open issues and future research directions in the area of program security vulnerability mitigation. © 2012 ACM.