This site presents a taxonomy of software security errors developed by the Fortify Software Security Research Group together with Dr. Gary McGraw. Each vulnerability category is accompanied by a detailed description of the issue with references to original sources, and code excerpts, where applicable, to better illustrate the problem.
The organization of the classification scheme is described with the help of terminology borrowed from Biology: vulnerability categories are referred to as phyla, while collections of vulnerability categories that share the same theme are referred to as kingdoms. Vulnerability phyla are classified into "seven plus one" pernicious kingdoms presented in the order of importance to software security:
The first seven kingdoms are associated with security defects in source code, while the last one describes security issues outside the actual code. To browse the kingdom and phylum descriptions, simply navigate the taxonomy tree on the left.
The primary goal of defining this taxonomy is to organize sets of security rules that can be used to help software developers understand the kinds of errors that have an impact on security. By better understanding how systems fail, developers will better analyze the systems they create, more readily identify and address security problems when they see them, and generally avoid repeating the same mistakes in the future.
When put to work in an analysis tool, a set of security rules organized according to this taxonomy is a powerful teaching mechanism. Because developers today are by and large unaware of the myriad ways they can introduce security problems into their work, making a taxonomy like this available should provide tangible benefits to the software security community.
Defining a better classification scheme can also lead to better tools: a better understanding of the problems will help researchers and practitioners create better methods for ferreting them out.
To read more about the taxonomy, please see Seven Pernicious Kingdoms: A Taxonomy of Software Security Errors.
The Kingdoms
Input Validation and Representation
Input validation and representation problems are caused by metacharacters, alternate encodings and numeric representations. Security problems result from trusting input. The issues include: "Buffer Overflows," "Cross-Site Scripting" attacks, "SQL Injection," and many others.
API Abuse
An API is a contract between a caller and a callee. The most common forms of API abuse are caused by the caller failing to honor its end of this contract. For example, if a program fails to call chdir() after calling chroot(), it violates the contract that specifies how to change the active root directory in a secure fashion. Another good example of library abuse is expecting the callee to return trustworthy DNS information to the caller. In this case, the caller abuses the callee API by making certain assumptions about its behavior (that the return value can be used for authentication purposes). One can also violate the caller-callee contract from the other side. For example, if a coder subclasses SecureRandom and returns a non-random value, the contract is violated.
Security Features
Software security is not security software. Here we're concerned with topics like authentication, access control, confidentiality, cryptography, and privilege management.
Time and State
Distributed computation is about time and state. That is, in order for more than one component to communicate, state must be shared, and all that takes time.
Most programmers anthropomorphize their work. They think about one thread of control carrying out the entire program in the same way they would if they had to do the job themselves. Modern computers, however, switch between tasks very quickly, and in multi-core, multi-CPU, or distributed systems, two events may take place at exactly the same time. Defects rush to fill the gap between the programmer's model of how a program executes and what happens in reality. These defects are related to unexpected interactions between threads, processes, time, and information. These interactions happen through shared state: semaphores, variables, the file system, and, basically, anything that can store information.
Errors
Errors and error handling represent a class of API. Errors related to error handling are so common that they deserve a special kingdom of their own. As with "API Abuse," there are two ways to introduce an error-related security vulnerability: the most common one is handling errors poorly (or not at all). The second is producing errors that either give out too much information (to possible attackers) or are difficult to handle.
Code Quality
Poor code quality leads to unpredictable behavior. From a user's perspective that often manifests itself as poor usability. For an attacker it provides an opportunity to stress the system in unexpected ways.
Encapsulation
Encapsulation is about drawing strong boundaries. In a web browser that might mean ensuring that your mobile code cannot be abused by other mobile code. On the server it might mean differentiation between validated data and unvalidated data, between one user's data and another's, or between data users are allowed to see and data that they are not.
Environment
This section includes everything that is outside of the source code but is still critical to the security of the product that is being created. Because the issues covered by this kingdom are not directly related to source code, we separated it from the rest of the kingdoms.