Using dynamic information flow analysis to detect attacks against applications

  • Authors:
  • Wes Masri;Andy Podgurski

  • Affiliations:
  • American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon;Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH

  • Venue:
  • SESS '05 Proceedings of the 2005 workshop on Software engineering for secure systems—building trustworthy applications
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

This paper presents a new approach to using dynamic information flow analysis to detect attacks against application software. The approach can be used to reveal and, under some conditions, to prevent attacks that violate a specified information flow policy or exhibit a known information flow signature. When used in conjunction with automatic cluster analysis, the approach can also reveal novel attacks that exhibit unusual patterns of information flows. A set of prototype tools implementing the approach have been developed for Java byte code programs. Case studies in which this approach was applied to several subject programs are described.