Improving network applications security: a new heuristic to generate stress testing data

Buffer overflows cause serious problems in different categories of software systems. For example, if present in network or security applications, they can be exploited to gain unauthorized grant or access to the system. In embedded systems, such as avionics or automotive systems, they can be the cause of serious accidents.This paper proposes to combine static analysis and program slicing with evolutionary testing, to detect buffer overflow threats. Static analysis identifies vulnerable statements, while slicing and data dependency analysis identify the relationship between these statements and program or function inputs, thus reducing the search space.To guide the search towards discovering buffer overflow in this work we define three multi-objective fitness functions and compare them on two open-source systems. These functions account for terms such as the statement coverage, the coverage of vulnerable statements, the distance form buffer boundaries and the coverage of unconstrained nodes of the control flow graph.