Quantifying Minimum-Time-To-Intrusion Based on Dynamic Software Safety Assessment

Abstract

This report presents an overview of the results of a three year DARPA-sponsored effort investigating dynamic software security analysis. This research effort resulted in the design and implementation of two major tool sets (FIST and VISTA), each comprised of many individual tools, and the development of a methodology that provides the capability to perform a thorough security analysis on a piece of security-critical software written in C or C++. The Fault Injection Security Tool (FIST) automates white-box dynamic security analysis of software using program inputs, fault injection and assertion monitoring of programs written in C and C++. The Visualizing STatic Analysis (VISTA) Tool provides a way of viewing and navigating static analysis properties of a program. Together these tools provide static and dynamic analysis capabilities that can identify security vulnerabilities in source code before its release. However, a major research issue remains. Though the current approach is able to discover security vulnerabilities through a process of fault injection and dynamic monitoring, the tools themselves are not able to determine whether such an event could occur through standard attacker input at the program interface. This effort only scratched the surface of work on this important problem.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Nov 01, 2000
Accession Number
ADA386611

Entities

People

  • Anup Ghosh
  • Frank Charron
  • Gary Mcgraw
  • Jeffery M. Voas
  • Michael F. Schatz

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Cyber
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes
  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force Research Laboratories
  • Application Software
  • C Programming Language
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computers
  • Cybersecurity
  • Information Systems
  • Information Warfare
  • Operating Systems
  • Safety
  • Security
  • Software Development
  • Software Testing
  • Standards
  • System Software
  • Transient Response Analysis

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Engineering

Readers

  • Computer Science.
  • Cybersecurity.
  • Software Engineering.