September 22, 2026

paper: TaintDroid: An Information-Flow Tracking System for Realtime Privacy Monitoring on Smartphones, Enck et al., OSDI 2010 (PDF, Slides and Talk)

We will first watch the talk, then discuss the paper. The paper describes TaintDroid, a system that follows sensitive data as it moves through Android apps in real time, and uses it to find 68 cases of possible misuse of private data in 30 popular apps.

Abstract

Today’s smartphone operating systems frequently fail to provide users with adequate control over and visibility into how third-party applications use their private data. We address these shortcomings with TaintDroid, an efficient, system-wide dynamic taint tracking and analysis system capable of simultaneously tracking multiple sources of sensitive data. TaintDroid provides realtime analysis by leveraging Android’s virtualized execution environment. TaintDroid incurs only 14% performance overhead on a CPU-bound micro-benchmark and imposes negligible overhead on interactive third-party applications. Using TaintDroid to monitor the behavior of 30 popular third-party Android applications, we found 68 instances of potential misuse of users’ private information across 20 applications. Monitoring sensitive data with TaintDroid provides informed use of third-party applications for phone users and valuable input for smartphone security service firms seeking to identify misbehaving applications.