Categorization of Software Errors that led to Security Breaches

A set of errors known to have led to security breaches in computer systems was analyzed. The analysis led to a categorization of these errors. After examining several proposed schemes for the categorization of software errors a new scheme was developed and used. This scheme classi es errors by their cause, the nature of their impact, and the type of change, or x, made to remove the error. The errors considered in this work are found in a database maintained by the COAST laboratory. The categorization is the rst step in the investigation of the e ectiveness of various measures of code coverage in revealing software errors that might lead to security breaches.