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

Angeliki Zavou, Georgios Portokalidis, Angelos D. Keromytis

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

21 Scopus citations

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.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAdvances in Information and Computer Security - 6th International Workshop, IWSEC 2011, Proceedings
Pages113-128
Number of pages16
DOIs
StatePublished - 2011
Event6th International Workshop on Security, IWSEC 2011 - Tokyo, Japan
Duration: 8 Nov 201110 Nov 2011

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume7038 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference6th International Workshop on Security, IWSEC 2011
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityTokyo
Period8/11/1110/11/11

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