Pointless tainting?: evaluating the practicality of pointer tainting

  • Authors:

  • Asia Slowinska;Herbert Bos

  • Affiliations:

  • Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands;Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and NICTA, Amsterdam, Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 4th ACM European conference on Computer systems
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

This paper evaluates pointer tainting, an incarnation of Dynamic Information Flow Tracking (DIFT), which has recently become an important technique in system security. Pointer tainting has been used for two main purposes: detection of privacy-breaching malware (e.g., trojan keyloggers obtaining the characters typed by a user), and detection of memory corruption attacks against non-control data (e.g., a buffer overflow that modifies a user's privilege level). In both of these cases the attacker does not modify control data such as stored branch targets, so the control flow of the target program does not change. Phrased differently, in terms of instructions executed, the program behaves 'normally'. As a result, these attacks are exceedingly difficult to detect. Pointer tainting is considered one of the onlymethods for detecting them in unmodified binaries. Unfortunately, almost all of the incarnations of pointer tainting are flawed. In particular, we demonstrate that the application of pointer tainting to the detection of keyloggers and other privacybreaching malware is problematic. We also discuss whether pointer tainting is able to reliably detect memory corruption attacks against non-control data. Pointer tainting generates itself the conditions for false positives. We analyse the problems in detail and investigate various ways to improve the technique. Most have serious drawbacks in that they are either impractical (and incur many false positives still), and/or cripple the technique's ability to detect attacks. In conclusion, we argue that depending on architecture and operating system, pointer tainting may have some value in detecting memory orruption attacks (albeit with false negatives and not on the popular x86 architecture), but it is fundamentally not suitable for automated detecting of privacy-breaching malware such as keyloggers.