The Secret Art of Computer Programming

  • Authors:
  • Annabelle K. Mciver

  • Affiliations:
  • Dept. Computer Science, Macquarie University, Australia 2109

  • Venue:
  • ICTAC '09 Proceedings of the 6th International Colloquium on Theoretical Aspects of Computing
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

"Classical" program development by refinement [12,2,3] is a technique for ensuring that source-level program code remains faithful to the semantic goals set out in its corresponding specification. Until recently the method has not extended to security-style properties, principally because classical refinement semantics is inadequate in security contexts [7]. The Shadow semantics introduced by Morgan [13] is an abstraction of probabilistic program semantics [11], and is rich enough to distinguish between refinements that do preserve noninterference security properties and those that don't. In this paper we give a formal development of Private Information Retrieval [4]; in doing so we extend the general theory of secure refinement by introducing a new kind of security annotation for programs.