Mining Security-Sensitive Operations in Legacy Code using Concept Analysis.pdf

Published in ICSE’07: Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering, Minneapolis, Minnesota, May 2007 Mining Security-Sensitive Operations in Legacy Code using Concept Analysis Vinod Ganapathy University of Wisconsin vg@ David King Trent Jaeger Pennsylvania State University {dhking,tjaeger}@ Somesh Jha University of Wisconsin jha@ Abstract This paper presents an approach to statically retrofit legacy servers with mechanisms for authorization pol- icy enforcement. The approach is based upon the observation that security-sensitive operations performed by a server are characterized by idiomatic resource manipulations, called fingerprints. Candidate fingerprints are automatically mined by clustering resource manipulations using concept analysis. These fingerprints are then used to identify 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 operations with a few hours of manual effort and modest domain knowledge. 1 Introduction Software systems must protect shared resources that they manage from unauthorized access. This is achieved by formulating and enforcing an appropriate authorization policy (also called access control policy). The policy specifies the set of security-sensitive operations that a user can perform on a resource. For example, a popular policy on UNIX-like systems allows only the root to perform the security-sensitive operations Read and Write on the /etc/passwd file (the resource). Operating systems have historically had mechanisms such as reference mon- itors [4] to enforce authorization policies. It is also important for user-space servers, such as middleware, web-, proxy and window-management servers, to implement such mechanisms because they manage shared resources on behalf of their clients. Unfortunately, economic and practical considerations force developers to choose function- ality and performance over sec