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Dynamic information flow analysis (DIFA) was devised to enable the flow of information among variables in an executing program to be monitored and possibly regulated. It is related to techniques like dynamic slicing and dynamic impact analysis. To better understand the basis for DIFA, we conducted an empirical study in which we measured the strength of information flows identified by DIFA, using information theoretic and correlation-based methods. The results indicate that in most cases the occurrence of a chain of dynamic program dependences between two variables does not indicate a measurable information flow between them. We also explored the relationship between the strength of an information flow and the length of the corresponding dependence chain, and we obtained results indicating that no consistent relationship exists between the length of an information flow and its strength. Finally, we …