The Bugs Framework (BF): A Structured Approach to Express Bugs

Abstract

To achieve higher levels of assurance for digital systems, we need to answer questions such as does this software have bugs of these critical classes? Do two software assurance tools find the same set of bugs or different, complimentary sets? Can we guarantee that a new technique discovers all problems of this type? To answer such questions, we need a vastly improved way to describe classes of vulnerabilities and chains of failures. We present the Bugs Framework (BF), which raises the current realm of best efforts and useful heuristics. Our BF includes rigorous definitions and (static) attributes of bug classes, along with their related dynamic properties, such as proximate, secondary and tertiary causes, consequences and sites. The paper discusses the buffer overflow class, the injection class and the control of interaction frequency class, and provides examples of applying our BF taxonomy to describe particular vulnerabilities.