This showed me that taint analysis is kind of slept on. Maybe we should invest in better tooling that allows us to reverse engineer with taint analysis easier. Do we think it is a UI problem? Of course over tainting is a thing, but maybe we can make it work with better UI.

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chuckadams an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Taint analysis won't help against memory safety vulnerabilities that directly scribble over untainted data to make it malicious. You need something like a secure enclave to prevent that kind of tampering.

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setr 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is that really the name for it? It sounds revolting

Can’t we just use prim and proper terms like provenance

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ill-ion 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"Provenance" tracks where data came from, but "taint" tracks where unsafe data can flow. It's a uhh not so sexy term, but it is the industry standard term.

	▲	hdgvhicv 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It’s been a fair few years since I got to write some new Perl but I’m fairly sure you could use Perl -T which meant any variables passed into the program (typically from cgi) would be tainted until you safely extracted the contents (via a regex for example) The word itself is getting on for a thousand years old, originally solely in the sense of colour dyes, similar to “stain”, but over time this was adopted to be “to corrupt” in a more figurative sense, I suspect the same root for taint and stain, with taint more indisputable and harder to remove perhaps. Seems appropriate to use in computing.

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QuantumNomad_ 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The main meaning of taint is contamination. Not really a revolting term to me. Maybe you associate it with some of its other meanings and that’s why you find it revolting.

	▲	stackghost 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		“Taint analysis” is certainly evocative.

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ill-ion 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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