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Transformational typing and unification for automatically correcting insecure programs

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Abstract

Before starting a rigorous security analysis of a given software system, the most likely outcome is often already clear, namely that the system is not entirely secure. Modifying a program such that it passes the analysis is a difficult problem and usually left entirely to the programmer. In this article, we show that and how unification can be used to compute such program transformations. This opens a new perspective on the problem of correcting insecure programs. We also demonstrate that integrating our approach into an existing transforming type system can improve the precision of the analysis and the quality of the resulting programs.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Information Security, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Boris Köpf

  2. Department of Computer Science, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    Heiko Mantel

Authors
  1. Boris Köpf
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  2. Heiko Mantel
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Boris Köpf.

Additional information

This is an extended version of the article [8] that appeared in Third International Workshop, FAST 2005, Revised Selected Papers, LNCS 3866, Springer-Verlag, 2006.

The second author gratefully acknowledges support by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

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Köpf, B., Mantel, H. Transformational typing and unification for automatically correcting insecure programs. Int. J. Inf. Secur. 6, 107–131 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-007-0016-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-007-0016-z

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