A unifying approach to the security of distributed and multi-threaded programs

  • Authors:
  • Heiko Mantel;Andrei Sabelfeld

  • Affiliations:
  • German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3, 66123 Saarbrücken, Germany;Department of Computer Science, Upson Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Computer Security - Special issue on CSFW14
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

The security of computation at the level of a specific programming language and the security of complex systems at a more abstract level are two major areas of current security research. With the objective to integrate the two, this article proposes an adequate translation of a timing-sensitive security property for simple multi-threaded programs into a more general security framework. Soundness and completeness of the translation guarantee that the trace-based specification of the translation of a multi-threaded program is secure if and only if the original program is secure. Finally, the translation is extended to a distributed setting, and it is demonstrated how to derive global security of the overall system from local security of each thread. The translation is presented as a two-step process where the first step is independent from the concrete programming language.