Title
Towards Automatically Generating Double-Free Vulnerability Signatures Using Petri Nets
Abstract
With the increased popularity of polymorphic and register spring attacks, exploit signatures intrusion detection systems (IDS) can no longer rely only on exploit signatures. Vulnerability signatures that pattern match based on properties of the vulnerability instead of the exploit should be employed. Recent research has proposed three classes of vulnerability signatures but its approach cannot address complex vulnerabilities such as the ASN.1 Double-Free. Here we introduce Petri nets as a new class of vulnerability signature that could potentially be used to detect other types of vulnerabilities. Petri nets can be automatically generated and are represented as a graph making it easier to understand and debug. We analyzed it along side the three other classes of vulnerability signatures in relation to the Windows ASN.1 vulnerability. The results were very promising due to the very low false positive rate and 0% false negative rate. We have shown that Petri nets are a very efficient, concise, and effective way of describing signatures (both vulnerability and exploit). They are more powerful than regular expressions and still efficient enough to be practical. Comparing with the other classes, only Turing machines provided a better identification rate but they incur significant performance overhead.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1007/978-3-540-85886-7_8
ISC
Keywords
Field
DocType
increased popularity,low false positive rate,signatures intrusion detection system,turing machine,petri nets,petri net,towards automatically generating double-free,better identification rate,vulnerability signature,complex vulnerability,windows asn,false negative rate,false positive rate,intrusion detection system,regular expression,polymorphism,pattern matching
Free list,Petri net,Computer science,Theoretical computer science,Exploit,Turing machine,Symbolic execution,Intrusion detection system,Pattern matching,Vulnerability
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
5222
0302-9743
2
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.40
14
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ryan Iwahashi120.40
Daniela A. S. de Oliveira2345.11
Shyhtsun Felix Wu389397.07
Jedidiah R. Crandall450853.67
Young-jun Heo542.52
Jintae Oh6257.28
Jongsoo Jang75513.43