HexType

HexType

Efficient detection of type confusion errors for C++

HexType is a sanitizer for C++ cast safety. The primary use case is during testing to detect type confusion issues in the code. Additionally, HexType may be run in a fuzzing environment to detect type violations.

Fuzzing
Key facts
Maturity
PrototypeIntermediateMature
Support
C4DT
Inactive
Lab
Unknown
  • Technical
  • Research papers

HexHive Group

HexHive Group
Mathias Payer

Prof. Mathias Payer

Our research focuses on software and systems security. Despite efforts and improvements in bug discovery techniques, some exploitable vulnerabilities will remain. We target techniques that both enable developers to discover and remove bugs and make programs resilient against the exploitation of unknown or unpatched vulnerabilities.
  • To discover bugs we propose (i) sanitization techniques that enforce a security property such as memory or type safety; given concrete program input, our sanitizers then flag any property violations (ii) fuzzing techniques that leverage static and dynamic analysis to create program inputs to explore program areas that are not yet covered through existing test cases.
  • To protect against exploitable vulnerabilities, we focus on control-flow integrity using specific language semantics, enforcing type integrity, and protecting selective data. Under this premise, we focus on compiler-based, runtime-based, and language-based protection mechanisms and security policies that increase the resilience of applications against attacks (in the presence of software vulnerabilities).

All prototypes are released as open-source.

This page was last edited on 2024-04-12.