Hybrid analysis of executables to detect security vulnerabilities
Pranith D. Kumar, Anchal Nema, Rajeev Kumar · 2009
Detection of vulnerabilities in executables is one of the major challenges facing the software industry and is mainly due to the unavailability of the source code. In this work, we present a hybrid approach which is a combination of static and dynamic analysis to identify vulnerabilities. In this approach, we first instrument the executable using PIN to extract the control flow and the corresponding assembly code using disassembler. We then perform static analysis on the assembly code for constraint bound checking using control flow and register bounds. In this way, we exploit the synergy between static and dynamic analysis to detect memory leaks, buffer overflow and dangling pointers.