Reference no: EM133740790

Assignment on Software Vulnerability

Software vulnerabilities, especially vulnerabilities in code, are a major security problem today. Not all bug or flaws in software become security vulnerabilities, but some of them do. An attacker can exploit these vulnerabilities to cause major disruption to a business. An exploit can result in a variety of damages including crash of a system, taking the role of a super user, deleting of information in a file or an entire file, changing critical content in a database or a file, stealing valuable proprietary information, planting of malware, turning a system into a bot so to launch attacks on other systems.
Common software code vulnerabilities include:
Buffer overflow
Logic error or logic bombs
Race conditions
Format string vulnerability
Cross-site scripting
Cross-site request forgery
SQL and other command injection
Memory leak
Incomplete mediation
Integer overflow, underflow, and sign conversion errors
Insufficient data validation
The name of vulnerability and the name of an attack that exploits it are often called by the same name. For example, the attack that exploits the buffer overflow vulnerability is known as the buffer overflow attack. Similarly, a race-condition attack leverages a race condition vulnerability. An attacker can and have exploited more than one vulnerability in the same attack to cause more damage than would be possible with a single vulnerability.