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Playlist "22C3: Private Investigations"

Autodafé: An Act of Software Torture

Martin Vuagnoux

Automated vulnerability searching tools have led to a dramatic increase of the rate at which such flaws are discovered. One particular searching technique is fault injection – i.e. insertion of random data into input files, buffers or protocol packets, combined with a systematic monitoring of memory violations. Even if these tools allow to uncover a lot of vulnerabilities, they are still very primitive; despite their poor efficiency, they are useful because of the very high density of such vulnerabilities in modern software.