This static analysis tool works to ensure your program's data flow does not spill beyond its banks.
An input program's data flow is explored using a combination of pointer analysis, static single assignment analysis, and taint analysis. "Sources" must not reach "sinks" without first passing through a "sanitizer." Additionally, source data can "taint" neighboring variables during a "propagation" function call, such as writing a source to a string. Such tainted variables also must not reach any sink.
Such analysis can be used to prevent the accidental logging of credentials or personally identifying information, defend against maliciously constructed user input, and enforce data communication restrictions between processes.
See guides/ for guided introductions on:
- How to configure and run the analyzer
- More topics coming soon!
Much data should not be freely shared. For instance, secrets (e.g, OAuth tokens, passwords), personally identifiable information (e.g., name, email or mailing address), and other sensitive information (e.g., user payment info, information regulated by law) should typically be serialized only when necessary and should almost never be logged. However, as a program's type hierarchy becomes more complex or as program logic grows to warrant increasingly detailed logging, it is easy to overlook when a class might contain these sensitive data and which log statements might accidentally expose them.
See design/.
See configuration/ for configuration details.
Static taint propagation analysis is a hard problem. In fact, it is undecidable. Concretely, this means two things:
- False negatives: the analyzer may fail to recognize that a piece of code is unsafe.
- False positives: the analyzer may incorrectly claim that a safe piece of code is unsafe.
Since taint propagation is often used as a security safeguard, we care more deeply about false negatives. If you discover unsafe code that the analyzer is not recognizing as unsafe, please open an issue here. Conversely, false positives waste developer time and should also be addressed. If the analyzer produces a report for code that you consider to be safe, please open an issue here.
For general bug reports (e.g. crashes), please open an issue here.
See CONTRIBUTING.md for details.
See DEVELOPING.md for details.
This is not an officially supported Google product.
