Timing Aware Information Flow Security for a JavaCard-like Bytecode

  • Authors:
  • Daniel Hedin;David Sands

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computing Science, Chalmers, Goteborg, Sweden;Department of Computing Science, Chalmers, Goteborg, Sweden

  • Venue:
  • Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS)
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Common protection mechanisms fail to provide end-to-end security; programs with legitimate access to secret information are not prevented from leaking this to the world. Information-flow aware analyses track the flow of information through the program to prevent such leakages, but often ignore information flows through covert channels even though they pose a serious threat. A typical covert channel is to use the timing of certain events to carry information. We present a timing-aware information-flow type system for a low-level language similar to a non-trivial subset of a sequential Java bytecode. The type system is parameterized over the time model of the instructions of the language and over the algorithm enforcing low-observational equivalence, used in the prevention of implicit and timing flows.