Taint-exchange: A generic system for cross-process and cross-host taint tracking

Abstract

Dynamic taint analysis (DTA) has been heavily used by security researchers for various tasks, including detecting unknown exploits, analyzing malware, preventing information leaks, and many more. Recently, it has been also utilized to track data across processes and hosts to shed light on the interaction of distributed components, but also for security purposes. This paper presents Taint-Exchange, a generic cross-process and cross-host taint tracking framework. Our goal is to provide researchers with a valuable tool for rapidly developing prototypes that utilize cross-host taint tracking. Taint-Exchange builds on the libdft open source data flow tracking framework for processes, so unlike previous work it does not require extensive maintenance and setup. It intercepts I/O related system calls to transparently multiplex fine-grained taint information into existing communication channels, like sockets and pipes. We evaluate Taint-Exchange using the popular lmbench suite, and show that it incurs only moderate overhead. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.