Security in Computing 5th Edition by Shari Lawrence Pfleeger, Charles P Pfleeger, Jonathan Margulies

Exercise 3

Your boss hands you a computer program and its technical reference manual. You are asked to check for undocumented features of the program. How is this activity similar to the task of the previous exercises? How does it differ? Which is the most feasible? Why?

Step 1 of 3

Technical Reference Manual:

To test the computer program the following method can be used as:

• First make the help through the technical manual so as to make the list of the various codes of microprocessor operations and list the expected range of the operands correspondingly.

• For each of the operation code, randomly choose few operands that are to be tested.

• Some of the chosen operands should be in the range, while the other operands in the extreme limits within the range and then finally pick out some that are outside the range completely.