Wen Li, Washington State University, Pullman; Jiang Ming, University of Texas at Arlington; Xiapu Luo, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University; Haipeng Cai, Washington State University, Pullman
Despite the fact that most real-world software systems today are written in multiple programming languages, existing program analysis based security techniques are still limited to single-language code. In consequence, security flaws (e.g., code vulnerabilities) at and across language boundaries are largely left out as blind spots. We present PolyCruise, a technique that enables holistic dynamic information flow analysis (DIFA) across heterogeneous languages hence security applications empowered by DIFA (e.g., vulnerability discovery) for multilingual software. PolyCruise combines a light language-specific analysis that computes symbolic dependencies in each language unit with a language-agnostic online data flow analysis guided by those dependencies, in a way that overcomes language heterogeneity. Extensive evaluation of its implementation for Python-C programs against micro, medium-sized, and large-scale benchmarks demonstrated PolyCruise's practical scalability and promising capabilities. It has enabled the discovery of 14 unknown cross-language security vulnerabilities in real-world multilingual systems such as NumPy, with 11 confirmed, 8 CVEs assigned, and 8 fixed so far. We also contributed the first benchmark suite for systematically assessing multilingual DIFA.
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author = {Wen Li and Jiang Ming and Xiapu Luo and Haipeng Cai},
title = {{PolyCruise}: A {Cross-Language} Dynamic Information Flow Analysis},
booktitle = {31st USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 22)},
year = {2022},
isbn = {978-1-939133-31-1},
address = {Boston, MA},
pages = {2513--2530},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity22/presentation/li-wen},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}
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