Bit-Level Taint Analysis

Abstract

Taint analysis has a wide variety of applications in software analysis, making the precision of taint analysis an important consideration. Current taint analysis algorithms, including previous work on bit-precise taint analyses, suffer from shortcomings that can lead to significant loss of precision (under/over tainting) in some situations. This paper discusses these limitations of existing taint analysis algorithms, shows how they can lead to imprecise taint propagation, and proposes a generalization of current bit-level taint analysis techniques to address these problems and improve their precision. Experiments using a deobfuscation tool indicate that our enhanced taint analysis algorithm leads to significant improvements in the quality of deobfuscation.