On the Deployment of Dynamic Taint Analysis for Application Communities

Hyung Chan KIM  Angelos KEROMYTIS 

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems  Vol.E92-D  No.3  pp.548-551
Publication Date: 2009/03/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1361
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: LETTER
Category: Application Information Security
Keyword: 
dynamic taint analysis,  0-day attack detection,  application community,  software security, 

Full Text: PDF(208.1KB)

Summary: 
Although software-attack detection via dynamic taint analysis (DTA) supports high coverage of program execution, it prohibitively degrades the performance of the monitored program. This letter explores the possibility of collaborative dynamic taint analysis among members of an application community (AC): instead of full monitoring for every request at every instance of the AC, each member uses DTA for some fraction of the incoming requests, thereby loosening the burden of heavyweight monitoring. Our experimental results using a test AC based on the Apache web server show that speedy detection of worm outbreaks is feasible with application communities of medium size (i.e., 250-500).