research-article

Mitigating program security vulnerabilities: Approaches and challenges

Authors:

Hossain Shahriar,

Mohammad ZulkernineAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), Volume 44, Issue 3

Article No.: 11, Pages 1 - 46

https://doi.org/10.1145/2187671.2187673

Published: 14 June 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Programs are implemented in a variety of languages and contain serious vulnerabilities which might be exploited to cause security breaches. These vulnerabilities have been exploited in real life and caused damages to related stakeholders such as program users. As many security vulnerabilities belong to program code, many techniques have been applied to mitigate these vulnerabilities before program deployment. Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive comparative analysis of different vulnerability mitigation works. As a result, there exists an obscure mapping between the techniques, the addressed vulnerabilities, and the limitations of different approaches. This article attempts to address these issues. The work extensively compares and contrasts the existing program security vulnerability mitigation techniques, namely testing, static analysis, and hybrid analysis. We also discuss three other approaches employed to mitigate the most common program security vulnerabilities: secure programming, program transformation, and patching. The survey provides a comprehensive understanding of the current program security vulnerability mitigation approaches and challenges as well as their key characteristics and limitations. Moreover, our discussion highlights the open issues and future research directions in the area of program security vulnerability mitigation.

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Index Terms

Mitigating program security vulnerabilities: Approaches and challenges
1. Information systems
  1. Data management systems
    1. Middleware for databases
      1. Distributed transaction monitors
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Process validation
        Walkthroughs
      2. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
        Process management
        Monitors

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Published In

cover image ACM Computing Surveys

ACM Computing Surveys Volume 44, Issue 3

June 2012

344 pages

ISSN:0360-0300

EISSN:1557-7341

DOI:10.1145/2187671

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Copyright © 2012 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 14 June 2012

Accepted: 01 September 2010

Revised: 01 June 2010

Received: 01 October 2009

Published in CSUR Volume 44, Issue 3

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