Title:

CONFU: Configuration Fuzzing Testing Framework for Software Vulnerability Detection

Author(s):

Dai, Huning
Murphy, Christian
Kaiser, Gail E.

Date:

2010

Type:

Technical reports

Department:

Computer Science

Permanent URL:

http://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:10507

Series:

Columbia University Computer Science Technical Reports

Part Number:

CUCS-011-10

Publisher:

Department of Computer Science, Columbia University

Publisher Location:

New York

Abstract:

Many software security vulnerabilities only reveal themselves under certain conditions, i.e., particular configurations and inputs together with a certain runtime environment. One approach to detecting these vulnerabilities is fuzz testing. However, typical fuzz testing makes no guarantees regarding the syntactic and semantic validity of the input, or of how much of the input space will be explored. To address these problems, we present a new testing methodology called Configuration Fuzzing. Configuration Fuzzing is a technique whereby the configuration of the running application is mutated at certain execution points, in order to check for vulnerabilities that only arise in certain conditions. As the application runs in the deployment environment, this testing technique continuously fuzzes the configuration and checks "security invariants'' that, if violated, indicate a vulnerability. We discuss the approach and introduce a prototype framework called ConFu (CONfiguration FUzzing testing framework) for implementation. We also present the results of case studies that demonstrate the approach's feasibility and evaluate its performance.

Subject(s):

Computer science

Item views:

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