PrivacyCAT: Privacy-Aware Code Analysis at Scale

Static and dynamic code analyses have been widely adopted in industry to enhance software reliability, security, and performance by automatically detecting bugs in the code. In this paper, we introduce PrivacyCAT1, a code analysis system developed and deployed at WhatsApp to protect user privacy. PrivacyCAT automatically detects privacy defects in code at early stages (before reaching production and affecting users), and therefore, it prevents such vulnerabilities from evolving into privacy incidents. PrivacyCAT comprises of a collection of static and dynamic taint analysers.