Mining for Mutation Operators for Reduction of Information Flow Control Violations

Abstract

The unintentional flow of confidential data to unauthorised users is a serious software security vulnerability. Detection and repair of such errors is a non-trivial task that has been worked on by the security community for many years. More recently, dynamic approaches, such as HyperGI, have been introduced that use hypertesting and genetic improvement to not only detect, but also provide a patch that reduces such information flow control violations. However, empirical studies performed so far have used mostly generic mutation operators, potentially limiting the strength of this approach. In this new ideas paper we mine the National Vulnerabilities Database to find repairs of information leaks. Of 636 issues initially identified, we found 73 fixes that relate to information leaks and come with open source patches to the code. From these, we identified 10 types of mutation operators with potential to fix such issues. Six of these have so far never been used to fix information leaks via automated mutation to the code. We propose that these could help improve effectiveness of tools using the HyperGI approach.