Dohun Kang , Yeoneo Kim , Gyun Woo

KIPS Transactions on Computer and Communication Systems, Vol. 5, No. 4, pp. 79-86, Apr. 2016
10.3745/KTCCS.2016.5.4.79,   PDF Download:

Abstract

About 75% of software security incidents are caused by software vulnerability. In addition, the after-market repairing cost of the software is higher by more than 30 times than that in the design stage. In this background, the secure coding has been proposed as one of the ways to solve this kind of maintenance problems. Various institutions have addressed the weakness patterns of the standard software. A new Korean programming language Saesark has been proposed to resolve the security weakness on the language level. However, the previous study on Saesark can not resolve the security weakness caused by the API. This paper proposes a way to resolve the security weakness due to the API. It adopts a static analyzer inspecting dangerous methods. It classifies the dangerous methods of the API into two groups: the methods of using tainted data and those accepting in-flowing tainted data. It analyses the security weakness in four steps: searching for the dangerous methods, configuring a call graph, navigating a path between the method for in-flowing tainted data and that uses tainted data on the call graph, and reporting the security weakness detected. To measure the effectiveness of this method, two experiments have been performed on the new version of Saesark adopting the static analysis. The first experiment is the comparison of it with the previous version of Saesark according to the Java Secure Coding Guide. The second experiment is the comparison of the improved Saesark with FindBugs, a Java program vulnerability analysis tool. According to the result, the improved Saesark is 15% more safe than the previous version of Saesark and the F-measure of it 68%, which shows the improvement of 9% point compared to 59%, that of FindBugs.

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