Comment by setr

4 days ago

Is that really the name for it? It sounds revolting

Can’t we just use prim and proper terms like provenance

4 comments

setr

Reply
ill-ion  4 days ago

"Provenance" tracks where data came from, but "taint" tracks where unsafe data can flow. It's a uhh not so sexy term, but it is the industry standard term.

  • hdgvhicv  4 days ago

    It’s been a fair few years since I got to write some new Perl but I’m fairly sure you could use Perl -T which meant any variables passed into the program (typically from cgi) would be tainted until you safely extracted the contents (via a regex for example)

    The word itself is getting on for a thousand years old, originally solely in the sense of colour dyes, similar to “stain”, but over time this was adopted to be “to corrupt” in a more figurative sense, I suspect the same root for taint and stain, with taint more indisputable and harder to remove perhaps.

    Seems appropriate to use in computing.

QuantumNomad_  4 days ago

The main meaning of taint is contamination. Not really a revolting term to me. Maybe you associate it with some of its other meanings and that’s why you find it revolting.