We present Privacy Scope, a new system that tracks the movement of sensitive user data as it flows through off-the-shelf applications. Privacy Scope uses application-level dynamic taint analysis, implemented with dynamic binary translation tools, to let users run applications in their own environment while pinpointing information leaks, even when the sensitive data is encrypted. The system is made possible by techniques we developed for accurate and efficient tainting. Semantic-aware instruction-level tainting handles special cases and is critical to avoid taint explosion or loss. Function summaries provide an interface to handle taint propagation within the kernel and reduce the overhead of instruction-level tracking. On-demand instrumentation enables fast loading of large applications.

Together, these techniques let us run on large, multi-threaded, networked applications and precisely track where information goes. In tests on Internet Explorer, Yahoo! Messenger, and Windows Notepad, Privacy Scope generated no false positives and instrumented fewer than 5% of the executed instructions.