Security Hardening of Open Source Software

Abstract

In this paper, we define the concept of software security hardening, which will allow the developers and maintainers to deploy and harden security features and remedy present vulnerabilities and threats into existing open source soft- ware. We also propose a classification of the different levels at which the hardening can be applied and a methodology for hardening of high level security into applications based on a well-defined security ontology. In addition to this con- tribution, we elaborate the methods for hardening security vulnerabilities found in C according to the classification we propose.