Int J Performability Eng ›› 2020, Vol. 16 ›› Issue (8): 1289-1298.doi: 10.23940/ijpe.20.08.p16.12891298

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Spectrum-based Security Bug Localization by Analyzing Error Propagation

Mengyu Ji*, Song Huang*, and Zhanwei Hui*   

  1. Command and Control Engineering Institute, Army Engineering University, Nanjing, 211101, China
  • Submitted on ; Revised on ; Accepted on
  • Contact: *E-mail address: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
  • About author:Mengyu Ji is a Master Degree graduated of Army Engineering University. His research interests include software testing and software fault localization.Song Huang is a professor of Army Engineering University. His research interests include software testing and software engineering.Zhanwei Hui is a post-doctoral of Army Engineering University. His research interests include software testing and software engineering.

Abstract: Software security bug is one of the key threats to the security of software systems. Isolating security bugs that may be potential security bugs is important. We formalize a program error propagation based model (PEP), which used to be applied to locate integer bug and our contribution are as follows: We formulate a theory model based on the mechanism of how the security bug triggers the program error propagation and propose a security bug localization approach by applying spectrum-based fault-localization (SFL) technique, a novel method to locate software fault to alleviate false negative and false positive problem. Our experimental results show that:1)Our model is more effective than present ones to locate nearly 97% integer bug and buffer overflow which are the main security bugs by examining 50% codes on average; 2) Compared with the traditional techniques, SFL can find 100% of integer bugs and buffer overflow so it is a promising, technology roadmap to reduce false negative and false positive for locating security bugs.

Key words: accuracy, security bug, fault localization, error state propagation