• Journal of Software Assessment and Valuation
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.65-79
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• 2020

As Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), popular components in industrial control systems (ICS), are incorporated with the technologies such as micro-controllers, real-time operating systems, and communication capabilities. As the latest PLCs have been connected to the Internet, they are becoming a main target of cyber threats. This paper proposes two sanitizers that improve the security of uC/OS-II based firmware for a PLC. That is, we devise BU sanitizer for detecting out-of-bounds accesses to buffers and UaF sanitizer for fixing use-after-free bugs in the firmware. They can sanitize the binary firmware image generated in a desktop PC before downloading it to the PLC. The BU sanitizer can also detect the violation of control flow integrity using both call graph and symbols of functions in the firmware image. We have implemented the proposed two sanitizers as a prototype system on a PLC running uC/OS-II and demonstrated the effectiveness of them by performing experiments as well as comparing them with the existing sanitizers. These findings can be used to detect and mitigate unintended vulnerabilities during the firmware development phase.