JFlow: practical mostly-static information flow control
Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
A sound type system for secure flow analysis
Journal of Computer Security
Using Peephole Optimization on Intermediate Code
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
Certification of programs for secure information flow
Communications of the ACM
A lattice model of secure information flow
Communications of the ACM
Lenient Array Operations for Practical Secure Information Flow
CSFW '04 Proceedings of the 17th IEEE workshop on Computer Security Foundations
Secure program execution via dynamic information flow tracking
ASPLOS XI Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
Downgrading policies and relaxed noninterference
Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
A Combined Approach for Information Flow Analysis in Fault Tolerant Hardware
ICECCS '07 Proceedings of the 12th IEEE International Conference on Engineering Complex Computer Systems
Secure coding in c and c++
BitBlaze: A New Approach to Computer Security via Binary Analysis
ICISS '08 Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Information Systems Security
Measuring channel capacity to distinguish undue influence
Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Fourth Workshop on Programming Languages and Analysis for Security
Scalable array SSA and array data flow analysis
LCPC'05 Proceedings of the 18th international conference on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing
SIFA: a tool for evaluation of high-grade security devices
ACISP'05 Proceedings of the 10th Australasian conference on Information Security and Privacy
Tool-supported dataflow analysis of a security-critical embedded device
AISC '12 Proceedings of the Tenth Australasian Information Security Conference - Volume 125
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Data flow analysis techniques can be used to help assess threats to data confidentiality and integrity in security-critical program code. However, a fundamental weakness of static analysis techniques is that they overestimate the ways in which data may propagate at run time. Discounting large numbers of these false-positive data flow paths wastes an information security evaluator's time and effort. Here we show how to automatically eliminate some false-positive data flow paths by precisely modelling how classified data is blocked by certain expressions in embedded C code. We present a library of detailed data flow models of individual expression elements and an algorithm for introducing these components into conventional data flow graphs. The resulting models can be used to accurately trace byte-level or even bit-level data flow through expressions that are normally treated as atomic. This allows us to identify expressions that safely downgrade their classified inputs and thereby eliminate false-positive data flow paths from the security evaluation process. To validate the approach we have implemented and tested it in an existing data flow analysis toolkit.