STACKEEPER: A Static Source Code Analyzer to Detect Stack-based Uninitialized Use Vulnerabilities

An uninitialized use vulnerability occurs when a memory region is accessed before initialized. This kind of vulnerability is common in C and C++ but sometimes it is not easy to detect. In this paper, we propose a byte-level model to detect uninitialized use vulnerabilities in the source code and build STACKEEPER, a flow-sensitive, path-sensitive and byte-sensitive static analyze tool against source code. By scanning the XNU source code we discovered several known or previously unknown uninitialized use vulnerabilities.