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104
TaintDroid: An Information-Flow Tracking System for Realtime Privacy Monitoring on Smartphones
, 2010
"... Today’s smartphone operating systems fail to provide users with adequate control and visibility into how third-party applications use their private data. We present TaintDroid, an efficient, system-wide dynamic taint tracking and analysis system for the popular Android platform that can simultaneous ..."
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Cited by 527 (26 self)
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Today’s smartphone operating systems fail to provide users with adequate control and visibility into how third-party applications use their private data. We present TaintDroid, an efficient, system-wide dynamic taint tracking and analysis system for the popular Android platform that can simultaneously track multiple sources of sensitive data. TaintDroid’s efficiency to perform real-time analysis stems from its novel system design that leverages the mobile platform’s virtualized system architecture. TaintDroid incurs only 14 % performance overhead on a CPU-bound micro-benchmark with little, if any, perceivable overhead when running thirdparty applications. We use TaintDroid to study the behavior of 30 popular third-party Android applications and find several instances of misuse of users ’ private information. We believe that TaintDroid is the first working prototype demonstrating that dynamic taint tracking and analysis provides informed use of third-party applications in existing smartphone operating systems.
Panorama: Capturing system-wide information flow for malware detection and analysis
- In Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conferences on Computer and Communication Security (CCS’07
, 2007
"... Malicious programs spy on users ’ behavior and compromise their privacy. Even software from reputable vendors, such as Google Desktop and Sony DRM media player, may perform undesirable actions. Unfortunately, existing techniques for detecting malware and analyzing unknown code samples are insufficie ..."
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Cited by 195 (28 self)
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Malicious programs spy on users ’ behavior and compromise their privacy. Even software from reputable vendors, such as Google Desktop and Sony DRM media player, may perform undesirable actions. Unfortunately, existing techniques for detecting malware and analyzing unknown code samples are insufficient and have significant shortcomings. We observe that malicious information access and processing behavior is the fundamental trait of numerous malware categories breaching users ’ privacy (including keyloggers, password thieves, network sniffers, stealth backdoors, spyware and rootkits), which separates these malicious applications from benign software. We propose a system, Panorama, to detect and analyze malware by capturing this fundamental trait. In our extensive experiments, Panorama successfully detected all the malware samples and had very few false positives. Furthermore, by using Google Desktop as a case study, we show that our system can accurately capture its information access and processing behavior, and we can confirm that it does send back sensitive information to remote servers in certain settings. We believe that a system such as Panorama will offer indispensable assistance to code analysts and malware researchers by enabling them to quickly comprehend the behavior and innerworkings of an unknown sample.
D.: Polyglot: automatic extraction of protocol message format using dynamic binary analysis
- In: CCS ’07: Proceedings of the 14th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
, 2007
"... Protocol reverse engineering, the process of extracting the application-level protocol used by an implementation, without access to the protocol specification, is important for many network security applications. Recent work [17] has proposed protocol reverse engineering by using clustering on netwo ..."
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Cited by 109 (21 self)
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Protocol reverse engineering, the process of extracting the application-level protocol used by an implementation, without access to the protocol specification, is important for many network security applications. Recent work [17] has proposed protocol reverse engineering by using clustering on network traces. That kind of approach is limited by the lack of semantic information on network traces. In this paper we propose a new approach using program binaries. Our approach, shadowing, uses dynamic analysis and is based on a unique intuition—the way that an implementation of the protocol processes the received application data reveals a wealth of information about the protocol message format. We have implemented our approach in a system called Polyglot and evaluated it extensively using real-world implementations of five different protocols: DNS, HTTP, IRC, Samba and ICQ. We compare our results with the manually crafted message format, included in Wireshark, one of the state-ofthe-art protocol analyzers. The differences we find are small and usually due to different implementations handling fields in different ways. Finding such differences between implementations is an added benefit, as they are important for problems such as fingerprint generation, fuzzing, and error detection.
All you ever wanted to know about dynamic taint analysis and forward symbolic execution (but might have been afraid to ask
- In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
, 2010
"... Abstract—Dynamic taint analysis and forward symbolic execution are quickly becoming staple techniques in security analyses. Example applications of dynamic taint analysis and forward symbolic execution include malware analysis, input filter generation, test case generation, and vulnerability discove ..."
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Cited by 106 (5 self)
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Abstract—Dynamic taint analysis and forward symbolic execution are quickly becoming staple techniques in security analyses. Example applications of dynamic taint analysis and forward symbolic execution include malware analysis, input filter generation, test case generation, and vulnerability discovery. Despite the widespread usage of these two techniques, there has been little effort to formally define the algorithms and summarize the critical issues that arise when these techniques are used in typical security contexts. The contributions of this paper are two-fold. First, we precisely describe the algorithms for dynamic taint analysis and forward symbolic execution as extensions to the run-time semantics of a general language. Second, we highlight important implementation choices, common pitfalls, and considerations when using these techniques in a security context. Keywords-taint analysis, symbolic execution, dynamic analysis I.
Dynamic vs. static flow-sensitive security analysis
, 2010
"... This paper seeks to answer fundamental questions about trade-offs between static and dynamic security analysis. It has been previously shown that flow-sensitive static information-flow analysis is a natural generalization of flowinsensitive static analysis, which allows accepting more secure program ..."
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Cited by 63 (14 self)
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This paper seeks to answer fundamental questions about trade-offs between static and dynamic security analysis. It has been previously shown that flow-sensitive static information-flow analysis is a natural generalization of flowinsensitive static analysis, which allows accepting more secure programs. It has been also shown that sound purely dynamic information-flow enforcement is more permissive than static analysis in the flow-insensitive case. We argue that the step from flow-insensitive to flow-sensitive is fundamentally limited for purely dynamic information-flow controls. We prove impossibility of a sound purely dynamic information-flow monitor that accepts programs certified by a classical flow-sensitive static analysis. A side implication is impossibility of permissive dynamic instrumented security semantics for information flow, which guides us to uncover an unsound semantics from the literature. We present a general framework for hybrid mechanisms that is parameterized in the static part and in the reaction method of the enforcement (stop, suppress, or rewrite) and give security guarantees with respect to terminationinsensitive noninterference for a simple language with output.
Document Structure Integrity: A Robust Basis for Cross-site Scripting Defense
"... Cross-site scripting (or XSS) has been the most dominant class of web vulnerabilities in 2007. The main underlying reason for XSS vulnerabilities is that web markup and client-side languages do not provide principled mechanisms to ensure secure, ground-up isolation of user-generated data in web appl ..."
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Cited by 62 (10 self)
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Cross-site scripting (or XSS) has been the most dominant class of web vulnerabilities in 2007. The main underlying reason for XSS vulnerabilities is that web markup and client-side languages do not provide principled mechanisms to ensure secure, ground-up isolation of user-generated data in web application code. In this paper, we develop a new approach that combines randomization of web application code and runtime tracking of untrusted data both on the server and the browser to combat XSS attacks. Our technique ensures a fundamental integrity property that prevents untrusted data from altering the structure of trusted code throughout the execution lifetime of the web application. We call this property document structure integrity (or DSI). Similar to prepared statements in SQL, DSI enforcement ensures automatic syntactic isolation of inline usergenerated data at the parser-level. This forms the basis for confinement of untrusted data in the web browser based on a server-specified policy. We propose a client-server architecture that enforces document structure integrity in a way that can be implemented in current browsers with a minimal impact to compatibility and that requires minimal effort from the web developer. We implemented a proof-of-concept and demonstrated that such DSI enforcement with a simple default policy is sufficient to defeat over 98 % of 5,328 real-world reflected XSS vulnerabilities documented in 2007, with very low performance overhead both on the client and server. 1
From dynamic to static and back: Riding the roller coaster of information-flow control research
, 2009
"... Historically, dynamic techniques are the pioneers of the area of information flow in the 70’s. In their seminal work, Denning and Denning suggest a static alternative for information-flow analysis. Following this work, the 90’s see the domination of static techniques for information flow. The common ..."
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Cited by 58 (21 self)
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Historically, dynamic techniques are the pioneers of the area of information flow in the 70’s. In their seminal work, Denning and Denning suggest a static alternative for information-flow analysis. Following this work, the 90’s see the domination of static techniques for information flow. The common wisdom appears to be that dynamic approaches are not a good match for security since monitoring a single path misses public side effects that could have happened in other paths. Dynamic techniques for information flow are on the rise again, driven by the need for permissiveness in today’s dynamic applications. But they still involve nontrivial static checks for leaks related to control flow. This paper demonstrates that it is possible for a purely dynamic enforcement to be as secure as Denning-style static information-flow analysis, despite the common wisdom. We do have the trade-off that static techniques have benefits of reducing runtime overhead, and dynamic techniques have the benefits of permissiveness (this, for example, is of particular importance in dynamic applications, where freshly generated code is evaluated). But on the security side, we show for a simple imperative language that both Denning-style analysis and dynamic enforcement have the same assurance: termination-insensitive noninterference.
On the Limits of Information Flow Techniques for Malware Analysis and Containment
"... Abstract. Taint-tracking is emerging as a general technique in software security to complement virtualization and static analysis. It has been applied for accurate detection of a wide range of attacks on benign software, as well as in malware defense. Although it is quite robust for tackling the for ..."
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Cited by 52 (1 self)
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Abstract. Taint-tracking is emerging as a general technique in software security to complement virtualization and static analysis. It has been applied for accurate detection of a wide range of attacks on benign software, as well as in malware defense. Although it is quite robust for tackling the former problem, application of taint analysis to untrusted (and potentially malicious) software is riddled with several difficulties that lead to gaping holes in defense. These holes arise not only due to the limitations of information flow analysis techniques, but also the nature of today’s software architectures and distribution models. This paper highlights these problems using an array of simple but powerful evasion techniques that can easily defeat taint-tracking defenses. Given today’s binary-based software distribution and deployment models, our results suggest that information flow techniques will be of limited use against future malware that has been designed with the intent of evading these defenses. 1
Information-flow security for a core of JavaScript
"... Tracking information flow in dynamic languages remains an important and intricate problem. This paper makes substantial headway toward understanding the main challenges and resolving them. We identify language constructs that constitute a core of JavaScript: objects, higher-order functions, excepti ..."
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Cited by 49 (7 self)
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Tracking information flow in dynamic languages remains an important and intricate problem. This paper makes substantial headway toward understanding the main challenges and resolving them. We identify language constructs that constitute a core of JavaScript: objects, higher-order functions, exceptions, and dynamic code evaluation. The core is powerful enough to naturally encode native constructs as arrays, as well as functionalities of JavaScript’s API from the document object model (DOM) related to document tree manipulation and event processing. As the main contribution, we develop a dynamic type system that guarantees information-flow security for this language.
Blueprint: Robust Prevention of Cross-site Scripting Attacks for Existing Browsers
- 30TH IEEE SYMPOSIUM ON SECURITY AND PRIVACY
, 2009
"... As social networking sites proliferate across the World Wide Web, complex user-created HTML content is rapidly becoming the norm rather than the exception. User-created web content is a notorious vector for cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks that target websites and confidential user data. In this t ..."
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Cited by 46 (2 self)
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As social networking sites proliferate across the World Wide Web, complex user-created HTML content is rapidly becoming the norm rather than the exception. User-created web content is a notorious vector for cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks that target websites and confidential user data. In this threat climate, mechanisms that render web applications immune to XSS attacks have been of recent research interest. A challenge for these security mechanisms is enabling web applications to accept complex HTML input from users, while disallowing malicious script content. This challenge is made difficult by anomalous web browser behaviors, which are often used as vectors for successful XSS attacks. Motivated by this problem, we present a new XSS defense strategy designed to be effective in widely deployed existing web browsers, despite anomalous browser behavior. Our approach seeks to minimize trust placed on browsers for interpreting untrusted content. We implemented this approach in a tool called BLUEPRINT that was integrated with several popular web applications. We evaluated BLUEPRINT against a barrage of stress tests that demonstrate strong resistance to attacks, excellent compatibility with web browsers and reasonable performance overheads. 1.
