2015 Reports

Dynamic Taint Tracking for Java with Phosphor (Demo)

Bell, Jonathan Schaffer; Kaiser, Gail E.

Dynamic taint tracking is an information flow analysis that can be applied to many areas of testing. Phosphor is the first portable, accurate and performant dynamic taint tracking system for Java. While previous systems for performing general-purpose taint tracking in the JVM required specialized research JVMs, Phosphor works with standard off-the-shelf JVMs (such as Oracle's HotSpot and OpenJDK's IcedTea). Phosphor also differs from previous portable JVM taint tracking systems that were not general purpose (e.g. tracked only tags on Strings and no other type), in that it tracks tags on all variables. We have also made several enhancements to Phosphor, allowing it to track taint tags through control flow (in addition to data flow), as well as allowing it to track an arbitrary number of relationships between taint tags (rather than be limited to only 32 tags). In this demonstration, we show how developers writing testing tools can benefit from Phosphor, and explain briefly how to interact with it.