Explicit Untainting to Reduce Shadow Memory Usage and Access Frequency in Taint Analysis

Abstract

Software vulnerabilities weaken the security of a system increasing possibility of being attacked by exploits in the wild. There are a lot of researches being done on efficiently finding software vulnerabilities to eliminate them. General program testing method for finding flaws in software can be categorized into whitebox and blackbox testing. In whitebox testing, tester examines the internals of the target program such as source codes while in blackbox testing, tester is not aware of the internal structure. Taint analysis is a blackbox testing method efficient for prioritizing exploitable crashes by tracking external input to the program. However due to memory usage and large amount of computation, taint analysis is slow to be used for commercial programs. There has been heuristic approaches to speed up the analysis process but it is not in state of practical use yet. In this paper, we propose a method to reduce resource usage by selectively not tracking certain memories and registers which we call untainting. Our evaluation results show that by untainting we can reduce number of taint operation by considerable amount.