SwordDTA: A dynamic taint analysis tool for software vulnerability detection

Abstract

Software vulnerabilities are the root cause of various information security incidents while dynamic taint analysis is an emerging program analysis technique. In this paper, to maximize the use of the technique to detect software vulnerabilities, we present SwordDTA, a tool that can perform dynamic taint analysis for binaries. This tool is flexible and extensible that it can work with commodity software and hardware. It can be used to detect software vulnerabilities with vulnerability modeling and taint check. We evaluate it with a number of commonly used real-world applications. The experimental results show that SwordDTA is capable of detecting at least four kinds of software vulnerabilities including buffer overflow, integer overflow, division by zero and use-after-free, and is applicable for a wide range of software.