UBITect: a precise and scalable method to detect use-before-initialization bugs in Linux kernel
| Autor: | Chengyu Song, Mohsen Lesani, Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy, Daimeng Wang, Yizhuo Zhai, Yu Hao, Paul Yu, Hang Zhang, Zhiyun Qian |
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| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
Source code
Computer science media_common.quotation_subject Initialization 020207 software engineering Linux kernel 02 engineering and technology computer.software_genre Symbolic execution 020204 information systems Kernel (statistics) Information leakage 0202 electrical engineering electronic engineering information engineering Operating system Type qualifier Privilege escalation computer media_common |
| Zdroj: | ESEC/SIGSOFT FSE |
| DOI: | 10.1145/3368089.3409686 |
| Popis: | Use-before-Initialization (UBI) bugs in the Linux kernel have serious security impacts, such as information leakage and privilege escalation. Developers are adopting forced initialization to cope with UBI bugs, but this approach can still lead to undefined behaviors (e.g., NULL pointer dereference). As it is hard to infer correct initialization values, we believe that the best way to mitigate UBI bugs is detection and manual patching. Precise detection of UBI bugs requires path-sensitive analysis. The detector needs to track an associated variable’s initialization status along all the possible program execution paths to its uses. However, such exhaustive analysis prevents the detection from scaling to the whole Linux kernel. This paper presents UBITect, a UBI bug finding tool which combines flow-sensitive type qualifier analysis and symbolic execution to perform precise and scalable UBI bug detection. The scalable qualifier analysis guides symbolic execution to analyze variables that are likely to cause UBI bugs. UBITect also does not require manual effort for annotations and hence, it can be directly applied to the kernel without any source code or intermediate representation (IR) change. On the Linux kernel version 4.14, UBITect reported 190 bugs, among which 78 bugs were deemed by us as true positives and 52 were confirmed by Linux maintainers. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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