Towards Security-Oriented Program analysis

While digital security concerns increase, we face both a urging demand for more and more code-level security analysis and a shortage of security experts. Hence the need for techniques and tools able to automate part of these code-level security analyses. As source-level program analysis and formal methods for safety-critical applications have made tremendous progress in the past decades, it is extremely tempting to adapt them from safety to security. Yet, security is not safety and, while still useful, a direct adaptation of safety-oriented program analysis to security scenarios remains limited in its scope. In this talk, we will argue for the need of security-oriented program analysis. Especially, we will first present some of the challenges faced by formal methods and program analysis in the context of code-level security scenarios. For example, security-oriented code analysis is better performed at the binary level, the attacker must be taken into account and practical security properties deviate from standard reachability / invariance properties. Second, we will discuss some early results and achievements carried out within the BINSEC group at CEA LIST. Especially, we will show how techniques such as symbolic execution and SMT constraint solving can be tailored to a number of practical code-level security scenarios.