RICH: Automatically Protecting Against Integer-Based Vulnerabilities

The authors present the design and implementation of RICH (Run-time Integer CHecking), a tool for efficiently detecting integer-based attacks against C programs at run time. C integer bugs, a popular avenue of attack and frequent programming error, occur when a variable value goes out of the range of the machine word used to materialize it, e.g. when assigning a large 32-bit int to a 16-bit short. They show that safe and unsafe integer operations in C can be captured by well-known sub-typing theory. The RICH compiler extension compiles C programs to object code that monitors its own execution to detect integer-based attacks. They implemented RICH as an extension to the GCC compiler and tested it on several network servers and UNIX utilities.