FlexiTaint: A programmable accelerator for dynamic taint propagation

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 speci...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Venkataramani, G., Doudalis, I., Solihin, Y., Prvulovic, M.
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Arrays
Engines
Hardware
Pipelines
Registers
Security
Software
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1530-0897
2378-203X
DOI:10.1109/HPCA.2008.4658637