18–20 Sept 2024
Europe/Vienna timezone

Integer Overflow Prevention

20 Sept 2024, 10:45
45m
"Room 1.14" (Austria Center)

"Room 1.14"

Austria Center

99
Birds of a Feather (BoF) Birds of a Feather (BoF)

Speakers

Dan Carpenter (Oracle) Justin Stitt (Google) Kees Cook (Google)

Description

Integer overflows are a constant source of security problems. Someone needs to do something about it. We'll discuss new approaches using static analysis and runtime sanitizers. These approaches will require creating new rules for writing safe code. Most integer overflows are "harmless". For example, we used to have repeated security issues related to passing negative sizes to copy_from_user() but eventually Kees added a check for that so now passing a negative is "harmless". Under the new rules, many integer overflows which were "harmless" are now considered a bug. We want the new rules to be as effective as possible while balancing that against the burden of dealing with false positives.

Primary authors

Presentation materials