TAJ: effective taint analysis of web applications

Taint analysis, a form of information-flow analysis, establishes whether values from untrusted methods and parameters may flow into security-sensitive operations. Taint analysis can detect many common vulnerabilities in Web applications, and so has attracted much attention from both the research community and industry. However, most static taint-analysis tools do not address critical requirements for an industrial-strength tool. Specifically, an industrial-strength tool must scale to large industrial Web applications, model essential Web-application code artifacts, and generate consumable reports for a wide range of attack vectors. We have designed and implemented a static Taint Analysis for Java (TAJ) that meets the requirements of industry-level applications. TAJ can analyze applications of virtually any size, as it employs a set of techniques designed to produce useful answers given limited time and space. TAJ addresses a wide variety of attack vectors, with techniques to handle...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: PLDI
• Authors: Omer Tripp, Marco Pistoia, Stephen J. Fink, Manu Sridharan, Omri Weisman
• Keywords: PLDI 2009, Programming Languages, Static Taint Analysis, Taint Analysis, Web Applications