An Interest In:
Web News this Week
- March 23, 2024
- March 22, 2024
- March 21, 2024
- March 20, 2024
- March 19, 2024
- March 18, 2024
- March 17, 2024
August 6, 2018 07:25 pm
Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/vIQsQA0VQlw/cramming-software-with-thousands-of-fake-bugs-could-make-it-more-secure-researchers-say
Cramming Software With Thousands of Fake Bugs Could Make It More Secure, Researchers Say
It sounds like a joke, but the idea actually makes sense: More bugs, not less, could theoretically make a system safer. From a report: Carefully scatter non-exploitable decoy bugs in software, and attackers will waste time and resources on trying to exploit them. The hope is that attackers will get bored, overwhelmed, or run out of time and patience before finding an actual vulnerability. Computer science researchers at NYU suggested this strategy in a study published August 2, and call these fake-vulnerabilities "chaff bugs." Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, assistant professor at NYU Tandon and one of the researcher on this study, told me in an email that they've been working on techniques to automatically put bugs into programs for the past few years as a way to test and evaluate different bug-finding systems. Once they had a way to fill a program with bugs, they started to wonder what else they could do with it. "I also have a lot of friends who write exploits for a living, so I know how much work there is in between finding a bug and coming up with a reliable exploit -- and it occurred to me that this was something we might be able to take advantage of," he said. "People who can write exploits are rare, and their time is expensive, so if you can figure out how to waste it you can potentially have a great deterrent effect." Brendan has previously suggested that adding bugs to experimental software code could help with ultimately winding up with programs that have fewer vulnerabilities.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/vIQsQA0VQlw/cramming-software-with-thousands-of-fake-bugs-could-make-it-more-secure-researchers-say
Share this article:
Tweet
View Full Article
Slashdot
Slashdot was originally created in September of 1997 by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. Today it is owned by Geeknet, Inc..More About this Source Visit Slashdot