Mining Security-Sensitive Operations in Legacy Code Using Concept Analysis

  • Authors:
  • Vinod Ganapathy;David King;Trent Jaeger;Somesh Jha

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Wisconsin, USA;Pennsylvania State University, USA;Pennsylvania State University, USA;University of Wisconsin, USA

  • Venue:
  • ICSE '07 Proceedings of the 29th international conference on Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

his paper presents an approach to statically retrofit legacy servers with mechanisms for authorization policy enforcement. The approach is based upon the obser- vation that security-sensitive operations performed by a server are characterized by idiomatic resource manipula- tions, called fingerprints. Candidate fingerprints are auto- matically mined by clustering resource manipulations using concept analysis. These fingerprints are then used to iden- tify security-sensitive operations performed by the server. Case studies with three real-world servers show that the approach can be used to identify security-sensitive opera- tions with a few hours of manual effort and modest domain knowledge.