Automatic Buffer Overflow Warning Validation

Abstract

Static buffer overflow detection techniques tend to report too many false positives fundamentally due to the lack of software execution information. It is very time consuming to manually inspect all the static warnings. In this paper, we propose BovInspector, a framework for automatically validating static buffer overflow warnings and providing suggestions for automatic repair of true buffer overflow warnings for C programs. Given the program source code and the static buffer overflow warnings, BovInspector first performs warning reachability analysis. Then, BovInspector executes the source code symbolically under the guidance of reachable warnings. Each reachable warning is validated and classified by checking whether all the path conditions and the buffer overflow constraints can be satisfied simultaneously. For each validated true warning, BovInspector provides suggestions to automatically repair it with 11 repair strategies. BovInspector is complementary to prior static buffer overflow discovery schemes. Experimental results on real open source programs show that BovInspector can automatically validate on average 60% of total warnings reported by static tools.