Mediaspace scheduled maintenance: Aug 25, 2026 07:00 - 12:00 AM. During this time, videos will be temporarily unavailable. Check status updates.

Lecture

Software Security: Security Testing - Sanitizers

In course

COM-301: Computer security and privacy

This is an introductory course to computer security and privacy. Its goal is to provide students with means to reason about security and privacy problems, and provide them with tools to confront them. ...

Description

This lecture covers the use of sanitizers in software security testing to detect bugs early by enforcing specific policies during compilation. Sanitizers like Address Sanitizer help find memory leaks and forbidden memory access, while also detecting out-of-bounds access and temporal memory errors.

Instructors (2)

Edouard Bugnion

Edouard Bugnion joined EPFL in 2012, where his focus is on datacenter systems. His areas of interest include operating systems, datacenter infrastructure (systems and networking), and computer architecture. Before joining EPFL, Edouard spent 18 years in the US, where he studied at Stanford and co-founded two startups: VMware and Nuova Systems (acquired by Cisco). At VMware from 1998 until 2005, he played many roles including CTO. At Nuova/Cisco from 2005 until 2011, he helped build the core engineering team and became the VP/CTO of Ciscos Server, Access, and Virtualization Technology Group, a group that brought to market Ciscos Unified Computing System (UCS) platform for virtualized datacenters. Prof. Bugnion is a Fellow of the ACM. Together with his colleagues, he received the ACM Software System Award for VMware 1.0 in 2009. His paper Disco: Running Commodity Operating Systems on Scalable Multiprocessors" received a Best Paper Award at SOSP '97 and was entered into the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award in 2008. At EPFL, he received the OSDI 2014 Best Paper Award for his work on the IX dataplane operating system

Carmela González Troncoso

Official source

Related concepts (32)

Bounds checking

In computer programming, bounds checking is any method of detecting whether a variable is within some bounds before it is used. It is usually used to ensure that a number fits into a given type (range checking), or that a variable being used as an array index is within the bounds of the array (index checking). A failed bounds check usually results in the generation of some sort of exception signal. As performing bounds checking during each use can be time-consuming, it is not always done.

Memory leak

In computer science, a memory leak is a type of resource leak that occurs when a computer program incorrectly manages memory allocations in a way that memory which is no longer needed is not released. A memory leak may also happen when an object is stored in memory but cannot be accessed by the running code (i.e. unreachable memory). A memory leak has symptoms similar to a number of other problems and generally can only be diagnosed by a programmer with access to the program's source code.

API testing

API testing is a type of software testing that involves testing application programming interfaces (APIs) directly and as part of integration testing to determine if they meet expectations for functionality, reliability, performance, and security. Since APIs lack a GUI, API testing is performed at the message layer. API testing is now considered critical for automating testing because APIs now serve as the primary interface to application logic and because GUI tests are difficult to maintain with the short release cycles and frequent changes commonly used with Agile software development and DevOps.

Unit testing

In computer programming, unit testing is a software testing method by which individual units of source code—sets of one or more computer program modules together with associated control data, usage procedures, and operating procedures—are tested to determine whether they are fit for use. It is a standard step in development and implementation approaches such as Agile. Before unit testing, capture and replay testing tools were the norm. In 1997, Kent Beck and Erich Gamma developed and released JUnit, a unit test framework that became popular with Java developers.

Undefined behavior

In computer programming, undefined behavior (UB) is the result of executing a program whose behavior is prescribed to be unpredictable, in the language specification to which the computer code adheres. This is different from unspecified behavior, for which the language specification does not prescribe a result, and implementation-defined behavior that defers to the documentation of another component of the platform (such as the ABI or the translator documentation).

Related lectures (27)

Property-Based Testing: Advanced Techniques

Explores advanced software testing techniques, including property-based testing, to ensure code correctness and improve software quality.

Automated Testing: Fuzzing and Sanitization

Explores fuzzing, bug oracles, code reviews, and automated testing techniques, emphasizing the importance of sanitization in detecting faults.

Software security - Security testing

Covers software security testing approaches and coverage metrics.

Verifying Compiler: Spec# Approach

Explores the Spec# programming system, focusing on a verifying compiler for C# 2.0.

Compiler Extension Lab