A Method for Software Vulnerability Detection Based on Improved Control Flow Graph

With the rapid development of software technology, software vulnerability has become a major threat to computer security. The timely detection and repair of potential vulnerabilities in software, are of great significance in reducing system crashes and maintaining system security and integrity. This paper focuses on detecting three common types of vulnerabilities: Unused_ Variable, Use_of_Uninitialized_Variable , and Use_After_ Free . We propose a method for software vulnerability detection based on an improved control flow graph (ICFG) and several predicates of vulnerability properties for each type of vulnerability. We also define a set of grammar rules for analyzing and deriving the three mentioned types of vulnerabilities, and design three vulnerability detection algorithms to guide the process of vulnerability detection. In addition, we conduct cases studies of the three mentioned types of vulnerabilities with real vulnerability program segments from Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE). The results of the studies show that the proposed method can detect the vulnerability in the tested program segments. Finally, we conduct manual analysis and experiments on detecting the three types of vulnerability program segments (30 examples for each type) from CWE, to compare the vulnerability detection effectiveness of the proposed method with that of the existing detection tool CppCheck. The results show that the proposed method performs better. In summary, the method proposed in this paper has certain feasibility and effectiveness in detecting the three mentioned types of vulnerabilities, and it will also have guiding significance for the detection of other common vulnerabilities.