HyperGI: Automated Detection and Repair of Information Flow Leakage

Abstract: Maintaining confidential information control in software is a persistent security problem where failure means secrets can be revealed via program behaviors. Information flow control techniques traditionally have been based on static or symbolic analyses -- limited in scalability and specialized to particular languages. When programs do leak secrets there are no approaches to automatically repair them unless the leak causes a functional test to fail. We present our vision for HyperGI, a genetic improvement framework tha detects, localizes and repairs information leakage. Key elements of HyperGI include (1) the use of two orthogonal test suites, (2) a dynamic leak detection approach which estimates and localizes potential leaks, and (3) a repair component that produces a candidate patch using genetic improvement. We demonstrate the successful use of HyperGI on several programs which have no failing functional tests. We manually examine the resulting patches and identify trade-offs and future directions for fully realizing our vision.