Capabilities for information flow

  • Authors:
  • Arnar Birgisson;Alejandro Russo;Andrei Sabelfeld

  • Affiliations:
  • Chalmers University of Technology;Chalmers University of Technology;Chalmers University of Technology

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 6th Workshop on Programming Languages and Analysis for Security
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

This paper presents a capability-based mechanism for permissive yet secure enforcement of information-flow policies. Language capabilities have been studied widely, and several popular implementations, such as Caja and Joe-E, are available. By making the connection from capabilities to information flow, we enable smooth enforcement of information-flow policies using capability systems. The paper presents a transformation that given an arbitrary source program in a simple imperative language produces a secure program in a language with capabilities. We present formal guarantees of security and permissiveness and report on experiments to enforce information-flow policies for web applications using Caja.