Today, traditional desktop applications, such as document viewers, presentation tools and chat applications are commonly available as online JavaScript applications. The complexity of the client-side components of web applications has exploded with the increase in popularity of web 2.0 applications. Given today’s binary-based software distribution and deployment models, our results suggest that information flow techniques will be of limited use against future malware that has been designed with the intent of evading these defenses. This paper highlights these problems using an array of simple but powerful evasion techniques that can easily defeat taint-tracking defenses. These holes arise not only due to the limitations of information flow analysis techniques, but also the nature of today’s software architectures and distribution models. Although it is quite robust for tackling the former problem, application of taint analysis to untrusted (and potentially malicious) software is riddled with several difficulties that lead to gaping holes in defense. It has been applied for accurate detection of a wide range of attacks on benign software, as well as in malware defense. Taint-tracking is emerging as a general technique in software security to complement virtualization and static analysis.
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