Evolving successful stack overflow attacks for vulnerability testing

Abstract

The work presented in this paper is intended to test crucial system services against stack overflow vulnerabilities. The focus of the test is the user-accessible variables, that is to say, the inputs from the user as specified at the command line or in a configuration file. The tester is defined as a process for automatically generating a wide variety of user-accessible variables that result in malicious buffers (an exploit). In this work, the search for successful exploits is formulated as an optimization problem and solved using evolutionary computation. Moreover the resulting attacks are passed through the Snort misuse detection system to observe the detection (or not) of each exploit