A static analysis for quantifying information flow in a simple imperative language

  • Authors:
  • David Clark;Sebastian Hunt;Pasquale Malacaria

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, Kings College, London, UK E-mail: david@dcs.kcl.ac.uk;Department of Computing, City University, London, UK E-mail: seb@soi.city.ac.uk;Department of Computer Science, Queen Mary, London, UK E-mail: pm@dcs.qmul.ac.uk

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Computer Security
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

We propose an approach to quantify interference in a simple imperative language that includes a looping construct. In this paper we focus on a particular case of this definition of interference: leakage of information from private variables to public ones via a Trojan Horse attack. We quantify leakage in terms of Shannon's information theory and we motivate our definition by proving a result relating this definition of leakage and the classical notion of programming language interference. The major contribution of the paper is a quantitative static analysis based on this definition for such a language. The analysis uses some non-trivial information theory results like Fano's inequality and the ℒ 1 inequality to provide reasonable bounds for conditional statements. While-loops are handled by integrating a qualitative flow-sensitive dependency analysis into the quantitative analysis.