Explicit untainting to reduce shadow memory usage in dynamic taint analysis

Abstract

As the growth of computing technologies and smart service, the dimension for importance of security of a system has been increased dramatically. Many researches for solving threats of software vulnerabilities have been proposed in worldwide. Ordinary program testing method for finding defects in software can be categorized into black-box testing and white-box testing. In Black-box testing, the tester does not need to tasks recognization of the internal structure of program, whereas in white-box testing, the tester checks to tasks recognization of internal structure of program. Taint analysis is an efficient black-box testing method for finding exploited crashes by tracking external input to the program. However, taint analysis method is too heavy and slow to provide for commercial analysis program, because of large amount of computation and shadow memory usage. Recent, many experimental approaches to weight down and to speed up the analysis process, but it were lacking in commercial use. In this paper, we propose a method to reduce shadow memory usage by selectively not trace the definite untainting memories. Our evaluation result shows that we can reduce number of taint operation by significant amount. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.