Automatic Removal of Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities in C/C++ Programs

Sun Ding, Hee Beng Kuan Tan, Hongyu Zhang

Abstract: Buffer overflow vulnerability is one of the commonly found significant security vulnerabilities. This vulnerability may occur if a program does not sufficiently prevent input from exceeding intended size or accessing unintended memory locations. Researchers have put effort in different directions to address this vulnerability, including creating a run-time defence mechanism, proposing effective detection methods or automatically modifying the original program to remove the vulnerabilities. These techniques share many commonalities and also have differences. In this paper, we characterize buffer overflow vulnerability in the form of four patterns and propose ABOR--a framework that integrates, extends and generalizes existing techniques to remove buffer overflow vulnerability more effectively and accurately. ABOR only patches identified code segments; thus it is an optimized solution that can eliminate buffer overflows while keeping a minimum runtime overhead. We have implemented the p