Title
STING: finding name resolution vulnerabilities in programs
Abstract
The process of name resolution, where names are resolved into resource references, is fundamental to computer science, but its use has resulted in several classes of vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities are difficult for programmers to eliminate because their cause is external to the program: the adversary changes namespace bindings in the system to redirect victim programs to a resource of the adversary's choosing. Researchers have also found that these attacks are very difficult to prevent systematically. Any successful defense must have both knowledge about the system namespace and the program intent to eradicate such attacks. As a result, finding and fixing program vulnerabilities to such as attacks is our best defense. In this paper, we propose the STING test engine, which finds name resolution vulnerabilities in programs by performing a dynamic analysis of name resolution processing to produce directed test cases whenever an attack may be possible. The key insight is that such name resolution attacks are possible whenever an adversary has write access to a directory shared with the victim, so STING automatically identifies when such directories will be accessed in name resolution to produce test cases that are likely to indicate a true vulnerability if undefended. Using STING, we found 21 previously-unknown vulnerabilities in a variety of Linux programs on Ubuntu and Fedora systems, demonstrating that comprehensive testing for name resolution vulnerabilities is practical.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2012
USENIX Security Symposium
name resolution processing,adversary changes namespace binding,program vulnerability,sting test engine,name resolution attack,name resolution vulnerability,name resolution,program intent,linux program,test case
Field
DocType
Citations 
World Wide Web,Internet privacy,Computer security,Computer science,Directory,Full disclosure,Namespace,Test case,Sting,Adversary,Secure coding,Vulnerability
Conference
5
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.42
44
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Hayawardh Vijayakumar11348.37
Joshua Schiffman228421.79
T Jaeger32635255.67