Precisely Characterizing Security Impact in a Flood of Patches via Symbolic Rule Comparison

Abstract

A bug is a vulnerability if it has security impacts when triggered. Determining the security impacts of a bug is important to both defenders and attackers. Maintainers of large software systems are bombarded with numerous bug reports and proposed patches, with missing or unreliable information about their impact. Determining which few bugs are vulnerabilities is difficult, and bugs that a maintainer believes do not have security impact will be de-prioritized or even ignored. On the other hand, a public report of a bug with a security impact is a powerful first step towards exploitation. Adversaries may exploit such bugs to launch devastating attacks if defenders do not fix them promptly. Common practice is for maintainers to assess the security impacts of bugs manually, but the scaling and reliability challenges of manual analysis lead to missed vulnerabilities.