FlexiTaint: A programmable accelerator for dynamic taint propagation

Abstract

This paper presents FlexiTaint, a hardware accelerator for dynamic taint propagation. FlexiTaint is implemented as an in-order addition to the back-end of the processor pipeline, and the taints for memory locations are stored as a packed array in regular memory. The taint propagation scheme is specified via a software handler that, given the operation and the sourcespsila taints, computes the new taint for the result. To keep performance overheads low, FlexiTaint caches recent taint propagation lookups and uses a filter to avoid lookups for simple common-case behavior. We also describe how to implement consistent taint propagation in a multi-core environment. Our experiments show that FlexiTaint incurs average performance overheads of only 1% for SPEC2000 benchmarks and 3.7% for Splash-2 benchmarks, even when simultaneously following two different taint propagation policies.