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Bugs gone bad

By SD Times News Team

August 1, 2008 — Static analyzers can identify and locate these security-related bugs:

Cross-site scripting: Causes the browser to execute arbitrary client-side scripting code, hijacking the user’s session and allowing the attacker to phish for account/financial information.

Injection flaws: Improperly validated data passing through the interpreter can “confuse” it and open the way for malicious code to be injected into the interpreter.

Buffer overflows: Mostly a C and C++ problem due to lack of memory, buffer overflows are similar to injection attacks; in this case, an attacker sends commands with too many characters and takes over the system, with full privileges.

Insecure direct object reference: Intentional or unintentional access to internal object handlers leads to exposure of data.

Information leakage and improper error handling: Overly helpful error messages cough up too much information about a system—version, system type, error type, etc.—giving an attacker more knowledge to launch exploits.

Resource leak: When programs leak memory, the operating system may terminate them for exceeding prescribed limits, affecting other programs on the computer. Attackers can then exploit the remaining processes, in much the same way as a buffer overflow.

Unintentional ignored expressions: When expressions are ignored, code is unreachable and cannot perform needed action. For example, a bug discovered by a Coverity customer, in which a missing parenthesis kept a single routine from executing, turned out to be the worst exploit that company had seen in five years, according to Ben Chelf, founding CTO at Coverity.

Null pointer de-reference: Invalid values assigned between operations lead to a hard crash, the most frequent cause of Windows’ Blue Screen of Death.

Web services: Malicious code can be injected into Web services entry points. Static analyzers include rule wizards and data APIs that perform cross-service analysis and identification of Web services entry points.

Custom cookies/hidden fields: Attackers can view the underlying HTTP response payload by viewing the source code of a Web page or by using proxies to find hidden files and cookies, and then modifying values to try to break developers’ assumptions and gain control of the application.

Sources: Coverity, Ounce Labs

Related Search Term(s): Security, testing & troubleshooting

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