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Follow the flow of hostile data

The most promising approach is to follow the flow of user specified data through the code. In a network server, for instance, locate the main dispatch functions that reads data from the network, and calls functions for processing it. Follow the flow of execution as the user specified data is passed around, analyzed, etc. This approach can give you a very high level of confidence in the code; the drawback is that it usually requires you to learn a lot about the application's internals, which may be tedious or even impossible.


Olaf Kirch 2002-01-16