DisTA: Generic Dynamic Taint Tracking for Java-Based Distributed Systems

Abstract

Dynamic taint tracking is a powerful information flow analysis approach, which can be applied in many analysis scenarios, e.g., debugging, testing, and security vulnerability detection. Most dynamic taint tracking approaches are designed for standalone systems, and cannot support inter-node taint tracking in distributed systems. Few inter-node taint tracking approaches are designed for specific distributed systems, e.g., Apache Spark, and require specific modifications to different distributed systems.In this paper, we present DisTA, a generic dynamic taint tracking tool for Java-based distributed systems. By instrumenting common network communication modules in Java, DisTA can perform inter-node taint tracking for different distributed systems with little manual efforts. We evaluate DisTA on five large-scale real-world distributed systems, e.g., ZooKeeper and Yarn, and require only 10 LOC launch script modification on average. The experimental results show that DisTA can accurately track all inter-node taints with a relatively low overhead.