String sanitizer modeling

Abstract

Code injection is a type of security vulnerability in which an attacker injects client-side scripts modifying the content being delivered. A sanitizer function may provide defense against such attacks by removing certain characters (e.g., characters causing state transitions in HTML). A string sanitizer may be modeled in order to determine its effectiveness by obtaining data flow information indicating string operations that used an input string or information derived therefrom, including a string sanitizer function. A deterministic finite automata representing string values of the output parameter may be generated based on a graph generated from the data flow information, where the automata accepts possible output string values of the sanitizer. It can be determined whether there is a non-empty intersection between the automata for the sanitizer output and an automata representing a security exploit, which would indicate that the sanitizer function is vulnerable to the exploit.