Information flow analysis is a promising approach for protecting the confidentiality and integrity of information manipulated by computing systems. Taint analysis, as in practice, is widely used in the area of software security assurance. This survey summarizes the latest advances on taint analysis, especially the solutions applied in different platform applications. Firstly, the basic principle of taint analysis is introduced along with the general technology of taint propagation implemented by dynamic and static analyses. Then, the proposals applied in different platform frameworks, including techniques for protecting privacy leakage on Android and finding security vulnerabilities on Web, are analyzed. Lastly, further research directions and future work are discussed.