An entropy conservation law for testing the completeness of covert channel analysis

Authors:
Randy Browne
Affiliations:
147 Old Bloomfield Avenue, Parsippany, New Jersey
Venue:
CCS '94 Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Conference on Computer and communications security
Year:
1994

Citing 4
Cited 3

A pump for rapid, reliable, secure communication

CCS '93 Proceedings of the 1st ACM conference on Computer and communications security
Design and verification of secure systems

SOSP '81 Proceedings of the eighth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Eliminating Formal Flows in Automated Information Flow Analysis

SP '94 Proceedings of the 1994 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
Mode Security: An Infrastructure for Covert Channel Suppression

SP '94 Proceedings of the 1994 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

Putting Trojans on the Horns of a Dilemma: Redundancy for Information Theft Detection

Transactions on Computational Science IV
Protecting confidential data on personal computers with storage capsules

SSYM'09 Proceedings of the 18th conference on USENIX security symposium
On information flow for intrusion detection: what if accurate full-system dynamic information flow tracking was possible?

Proceedings of the 2010 workshop on New security paradigms

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Covert channel analysis typically involves study of individual covert channels in isolation, and determining the thoroughness of such case-by-case analysis can be difficult. To help address this problem, this paper formally defines the notion of a “complete” set of covert channels. Informally, a set of covert channels is “complete” when those channels in the set can operate in tandem to produce the maximum possible covert information flow out of a system. More formally, a “complete” set of covert channels is defined as a solution to an equation called the Maximum Information Flow Equation. An alternate way of expressing “completeness” for sets of covert channels is that all “complete” convert channel sets, and only “complete” sets, always satisfy a certain Entropy Conservation Law, which is given in different forms. One form of the Entropy Conservation Law is that any “complete” set of covert channels can be used to represent overall system behavior in what the author calls Covert Channel Normal Form. Although this paper is mainly theoretical in nature, the author also discusses some possible ways of using the theory, along with open issues.