Securing distributed systems with information flow control

  • Authors:
  • Nickolai Zeldovich;Silas Boyd-Wickizer;David Mazières

  • Affiliations:
  • Stanford University;Stanford University;Stanford University

  • Venue:
  • NSDI'08 Proceedings of the 5th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Recent operating systems [12, 21, 26] have shown that decentralized information flow control (DIFC) can secure applications built from mostly untrusted code. This paper extends DIFC to the network. We present DStar, a system that enforces the security requirements of mutually distrustful components through cryptography on the network and local OS protection mechanisms on each host. DStar does not require any fully-trusted processes or machines, and is carefully constructed to avoid covert channels inherent in its interface. We use DStar to build a three-tiered web server that mitigates the effects of untrustworthy applications and compromised machines.