Hello, As a software tester I might offer some information.
I am primarily a "black box" tester, which means I do not go into the code. I use the product as a user would. We do some automated testing with tools like Winrunner. However, many testers do exploratory or ad hoc testing for these items. This involves using the program thinking of ways to break it, theny trying them and documenting the results. In many cases there are requirements to test against, but these rarely find the type of problems you are addressing. However, requirements and written test cases can ensure that the bug does not reappear due to code reuse or old code getting into a build. Testing can be a basic as holding down a key in a field for two minutes to see if a buffer overflow happened (it did). I include things like the entry of bad data and other items in my test cases. >From a customer standpoint, many people do not allow new code to be placed on >production systems. They have separate test systems where the program is exercised >before it can go on to production system. Such a system can lend itself to >automating test cases for new version of existing software. It really comes down to having people who like to break software. These do not have to be programmers or IT admins. My background is in newspaper journalism. In some cases specific technical knowledge may be needed. But often the technical person needs to be teamed with someone who thinks more like a user. If a programmer says "someone would never do that" in reference to an action with a program, you can bet everything you own that at some time somebody will. Take the classic case of a video card that if it had more than one monitor connected to it, the monitors would catch fire! -----Original Message----- From: kaipower [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, April 04, 2002 7:05 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Techniques for Vulneability discovery Hi, After reading the mailing list for quite a while, there is a burning question which I kept asking myself: How do experts discover vulnerabilities in a system/software? Some categories of vulnerabilities that I am aware of: 1) Buffer overflow (Stack or Heap) 2) Mal access control and Trust management 3) Cross site scripting 4) Unexpected input - e.g. SQL injection? 5) Race conditions 6) password authentication Do people just run scripts to brute force to find vulnerabilities? (as in the case of Buffer overflows) Or do they do a reverse engineer of the software? How relevant is reverse engineering in this context? Anybody out there care to give a methodology/strategy in finding vulnerabilities? Mike _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com __________________________________________________ D O T E A S Y - "Join the web hosting revolution!" http://www.doteasy.com
