• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.253-266
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• 2023

The Null Pointer Dereference vulnerability is a significant vulnerability that can cause severe attacks such as denial-of-service. Previous research has proposed methods for detecting vulnerabilities, but large and complex programs pose a challenge to their efficiency. In this paper, we present a lightweight tool for detecting specific functions in large binaryprograms through symbolizing variables and emulating program execution. The tool detects vulnerabilities through data dependency analysis and heuristics in each execution path. While our tool had an 8% higher false positive rate than the bap_toolkit, it detected all existing vulnerabilities in our dataset.