Finding Backdoor Threats with Static Analysis

According to research from Gartner, 75% of all new security attacks are against applications and 90% of all vulnerabilities reside within software. However, enterprise IT security continues to be concentrated on the network to protect the perimeter from external attack rather than detecting vulnerabilities on the inside. In some of the world's largest businesses, there's evidence that malicious users may be deliberately leaving "backdoor" vulnerabilities to be exploited later when applications are put into full production. Methods are available to detect backdoors in your software, with static analysis as the most effective technique available. Chris Wysopal explains the technology and benefits of binary and source code static analysis and presents various techniques for inspecting software for backdoors along with the pros and cons of each method. Chris shows examples of how backdoors present themselves in software and how best to find them.

• Why backdoors in software are difficult to detect
• Manual and automated detection of backdoors
• How static binary analysis works