DESENSITIZATION: Privacy-Aware and Attack-Preserving Crash Report

Ren Ding, Hong Hu, Wen Xu, Taesoo Kim

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

Software vendors collect crash reports from end-users to assist in the debugging and testing of their products. However, crash reports may contain users' private information, like names and passwords, rendering the user hesitant to share the reports with developers. We need a mechanism to protect users' privacy in crash reports on the client side while keeping sufficient information to support server-side debugging and analysis. In this paper, we propose the DESENSITIZATION technique, which generates privacy-aware and attack-preserving crash reports from crashed executions. Our tool adopts lightweight methods to identify bug-related and attack-related data from the memory, and removes other data to protect users' privacy. Since a large portion of the desensitized memory contains null bytes, we store crash reports in spare files to save the network bandwidth and the server-side storage. We prototype DESENSITIZATION and apply it to a large number of crashes of real-world programs, like browsers and the JavaScript engine. The result shows that our DESENSITIZATION technique can eliminate 80.9% of nonzero bytes from coredumps, and 49.0% from minidumps. The desensitized crash report can be 50.5% smaller than the original one, which significantly saves resources for report submission and storage. Our DESENSITIZATION technique is a push-button solution for the privacy-aware crash report.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication27th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, NDSS 2020
PublisherThe Internet Society
ISBN (Electronic)1891562614, 9781891562617
DOIs
StatePublished - 2020
Event27th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, NDSS 2020 - San Diego, United States
Duration: Feb 23 2020Feb 26 2020

Publication series

Name27th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, NDSS 2020

Conference

Conference27th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, NDSS 2020
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Diego
Period2/23/202/26/20

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality

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