Overcoming programming flaws: indexing of common software vulnerabilities

The goal of this research project was to identify categories of programming flaws that lead to software bugs and index existing vulnerability reports against those categories. A keyword-based search placed 70% of the records from the OSVDB and CVE databases into 15 vulnerability categories. The results identified malformed data, buffer overflow and cross-site scripting as the top three issues. The project laid the foundations for future research into ways of mitigating programming flaws.