Scalable Language Agnostic Taint Tracking using Explicit Data Dependencies
Sedick David Baker Effendi, Xavier Pinho, Andrei Michael Dreyer, Fabian Yamaguchi · 2025
Taint analysis using explicit whole-program data-dependence graphs is powerful for vulnerability discovery but faces two major challenges. First, accurately modeling taint propagation through calls to external library procedures requires extensive manual annotations, which becomes impractical for large ecosystems. Second, the sheer size of whole-program graph representations leads to serious scalability and performance issues, particularly when quick analysis is needed in continuous development pipelines.