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arXiv · 1701.04045

Static Detection of DoS Vulnerabilities in Programs that use Regular Expressions (Extended Version)

Valentin Wüstholz·Oswaldo Olivo·Marijn J. H. Heule·Isil Dillig
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Abstract

In an algorithmic complexity attack, a malicious party takes advantage of the worst-case behavior of an algorithm to cause denial-of-service. A prominent algorithmic complexity attack is regular expression denial-of-service (ReDoS), in which the attacker exploits a vulnerable regular expression by providing a carefully-crafted input string that triggers worst-case behavior of the matching algorithm. This paper proposes a technique for automatically finding ReDoS vulnerabilities in programs. Specifically, our approach automatically identifies vulnerable regular expressions in the program and determines whether an "evil" input string can be matched against a vulnerable regular expression. We have implemented our proposed approach in a tool called REXPLOITER and found 41 exploitable security vulnerabilities in Java web applications.

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BibTeXRIS

Valentin Wüstholz, Oswaldo Olivo, Marijn J. H. Heule, Isil Dillig. 2017-01-15. Static Detection of DoS Vulnerabilities in Programs that use Regular Expressions (Extended Version). https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.04045

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