DESERVE: a Framework for Detecting Program Security Vulnerability Exploitations

Abstract

It is difficult to develop a program that is completely free from vulnerabilities. Despite the applications of many approaches to secure programs, vulnerability exploitations occur in real world in large numbers. Exploitations of vulnerabilities may corrupt memory spaces and program states, lead to denial of services and authorization bypassing, provide attackers the access to authorization information, and leak sensitive information. Monitoring at the program code level can be a way of vulnerability exploitation detection at runtime. In this work, we propose a monitor embedding framework DESERVE (a framework for DEtecting program SEcuRity Vulnerability Exploitations). DESERVE identifies exploitable statements from source code based on static backward slicing and embeds necessary code to detect attacks. During the deployment stage, the enhanced programs execute exploitable statements in a separate test environment. Unlike traditional monitors that extract and store program state information to compare with vulnerable free program states to detect exploitation, our approach does not need to save state information. Moreover, the slicing technique allows us to avoid the tracking of fine grained level of information about runtime program environments such as input flow and memory state. We implement DESERVE for detecting buffer overflow, SQL injection, and cross-site scripting attacks. We evaluate our approach for real world programs implemented in C and PHP languages. The results show that the approach can detect some of the well-known attacks. Moreover, the approach imposes negligible runtime overhead.