A Comparison of Publicly Available Tools for Dynamic Buffer Overflow Prevention

Abstract

The size and complexity of software systems is growing, increasing the number of bugs. Many of these bugs constitute security vulnerabilities. Most common of these bugs is the buffer overflow vulnerability. In this paper we implement a testbed of 20 different buffer overflow attacks, and use it to compare four publicly available tools for dynamic intrusion prevention aiming to stop buffer overflows. The tools are compared empirically and theoretically. The best tool is effective against only 50% of the attacks and there are six attack forms which none of the tools can handle.