Visible to the public Biblio

Filters: Keyword is API misuses  [Clear All Filters]
2021-12-20
Singleton, Larry, Zhao, Rui, Siy, Harvey, Song, Myoungkyu.  2021.  FireBugs: Finding and Repairing Cryptography API Misuses in Mobile Applications. 2021 IEEE 45th Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC). :1194–1201.
In this paper, we present FireBugs for Finding and Repairing Bugs based on security patterns. For the common misuse patterns of cryptography APIs (crypto APIs), we encode common cryptography rules into the pattern representations for bug detection and program repair regarding cryptography rule violations. In the evaluation, we conducted a case study to assess the bug detection capability by applying FireBugs to datasets mined from both open source and commercial projects. Also, we conducted a user study with professional software engineers at Mutual of Omaha Insurance Company to estimate the program repair capability. This evaluation showed that FireBugs can help professional engineers develop various cryptographic requirements in a resilient application.
2020-08-14
Gu, Zuxing, Zhou, Min, Wu, Jiecheng, Jiang, Yu, Liu, Jiaxiang, Gu, Ming.  2019.  IMSpec: An Extensible Approach to Exploring the Incorrect Usage of APIs. 2019 International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Software Engineering (TASE). :216—223.
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) usually have usage constraints, such as call conditions or call orders. Incorrect usage of these constraints, called API misuse, will result in system crashes, bugs, and even security problems. It is crucial to detect such misuses early in the development process. Though many approaches have been proposed over the last years, recent studies show that API misuses are still prevalent, especially the ones specific to individual projects. In this paper, we strive to improve current API-misuse detection capability for large-scale C programs. First, We propose IMSpec, a lightweight domain-specific language enabling developers to specify API usage constraints in three different aspects (i.e., parameter validation, error handling, and causal calling), which are the majority of API-misuse bugs. Then, we have tailored a constraint guided static analysis engine to automatically parse IMSpec rules and detect API-misuse bugs with rich semantics. We evaluate our approach on widely used benchmarks and real-world projects. The results show that our easily extensible approach performs better than state-of-the-art tools. We also discover 19 previously unknown bugs in real-world open-source projects, all of which have been confirmed by the corresponding developers.