Testing for software vulnerability using environment perturbation

We describe an methodology for testing a software system for possible security flaws. Based on the observation that most security flaws are caused by the program's inappropriate interactions with the environment, and triggered by user's malicious perturbation on the environment (which we call an environment fault), we view the security testing problem as the problem of testing for the fault-tolerance properties of a software system. We consider each environment perturbation as a fault and the resulting security compromise a failure in the toleration of such faults. Our approach is based on the well known technique of fault-injection. Environment faults are injected into the system under test and system behavior observed. The failure to tolerate faults is an indicator of a potential security flaw in the system. An Environment-Application Interaction (EAI) fault model is proposed which guides us to decide what faults to inject. Based on EAI, we have developed a security testing methodology, and apply it to several applications. We successfully identified a number of vulnerabilities include vulnerabilities in Windows NT operating system.