Neutaint: Efficient Dynamic Taint Analysis with Neural Networks
This work addresses inefficiencies in dynamic taint analysis for software security applications, offering a novel method that improves accuracy and reduces overhead, though it is domain-specific to program analysis.
The authors tackled the problem of inaccurate and inefficient dynamic taint analysis (DTA) by proposing NEUTAINT, which uses neural program embeddings and saliency maps to learn information flow from execution traces, achieving 68% accuracy (a 10% improvement) and reducing runtime overhead by 40 times compared to the second-best tool.
Dynamic taint analysis (DTA) is widely used by various applications to track information flow during runtime execution. Existing DTA techniques use rule-based taint-propagation, which is neither accurate (i.e., high false positive) nor efficient (i.e., large runtime overhead). It is hard to specify taint rules for each operation while covering all corner cases correctly. Moreover, the overtaint and undertaint errors can accumulate during the propagation of taint information across multiple operations. Finally, rule-based propagation requires each operation to be inspected before applying the appropriate rules resulting in prohibitive performance overhead on large real-world applications. In this work, we propose NEUTAINT, a novel end-to-end approach to track information flow using neural program embeddings. The neural program embeddings model the target's programs computations taking place between taint sources and sinks, which automatically learns the information flow by observing a diverse set of execution traces. To perform lightweight and precise information flow analysis, we utilize saliency maps to reason about most influential sources for different sinks. NEUTAINT constructs two saliency maps, a popular machine learning approach to influence analysis, to summarize both coarse-grained and fine-grained information flow in the neural program embeddings. We compare NEUTAINT with 3 state-of-the-art dynamic taint analysis tools. The evaluation results show that NEUTAINT can achieve 68% accuracy, on average, which is 10% improvement while reducing 40 times runtime overhead over the second-best taint tool Libdft on 6 real world programs. NEUTAINT also achieves 61% more edge coverage when used for taint-guided fuzzing indicating the effectiveness of the identified influential bytes.