• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.365-375
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• 2019

A PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) is a highly-reliable industrial digital computer which supports real-time embedded control applications for safety-critical control systems. Real-time operating systems such as uC/OS have been used for PLCs and must meet real-time constraints. As PLCs have been widely used for industrial control systems and connected to the Internet, they have been becoming a main target of cyberattacks. In this paper, we propose an execution code sanitizer to enhance the security of PLC systems. The proposed sanitizer analyzes PLC programs developed by an IDE before downloading the program to a target PLC, and mitigates security vulnerabilities of the program. Our sanitizer can detect vulnerable function calls and illegal memory accesses in development of PLC programs using a database of vulnerable functions as well as the other database of code patterns related to pointer misuses. Based on these DBs, it detects and removes abnormal use patterns of pointer variables and existence of vulnerable functions shown in the call graph of the target executable code. We have implemented the proposed technique and verified its effectiveness through experiments.