Patent ID: 7418734

Claim:
A method of detecting privilege escalation vulnerabilities in a pre-existing source code listing, said source code listing having a listed sequence of expressions, each expression including a set of operands and operators to transform values of the operands, said source code listing further having routine calls, said routine calls including arguments with which to invoke a routine, said source code listing being stored in computer readable medium having computer executable instructions, wherein a privilege escalation vulnerability is an uncontrolled escalation of system privileges that allows unauthorized access to system resources, the method comprising: providing a list specifying routines that potentially cause privilege escalation vulnerabilities; providing pre-specified ranges of values for arguments of routines in the list that cause privilege escalation vulnerabilities; analyzing the source code listing to identify calls to routines specified in the list; analyzing the source code listing to semantically analyze arguments of the identified routine calls to determine routine calls that possess privilege escalation vulnerabilities using the pre-specified ranges of values; wherein semantically analyzing the arguments of the identified routine calls comprises analyzing the source code listing to create computer models of the arguments, each model specifying a range of values that each corresponding argument can take when the source code listing is executed; and generating a report that identifies the vulnerabilities.