Detection and diagnosis of control interception

Abstract

Crash implies that a software is unstable and possibly vulnerable. Stack overflow is one of many causes of crashes. This kind of bug is often hard to debug because of the corrupted stack, so that debuggers cannot trace the control flow of the programs. A control-type crash caused by stack overflow is easy to be developed as a control interception attack. We develop a method to locate this attack and implement it as a plug-in of Valgrind [1]. This tool can be used in the honeypot to detect and diagnose zero-day exploits. We use it to detect several vulnerabilities and automatically locate the bugs.