Encoding Information Flow in Haskell

  • Authors:
  • Peng Li;Steve Zdancewic

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Pennsylvania, USA;University of Pennsylvania, USA

  • Venue:
  • CSFW '06 Proceedings of the 19th IEEE workshop on Computer Security Foundations
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

This paper presents an embedded security sublanguage for enforcing information-flow policies in the standard Haskell programming language. The sublanguage provides useful information-flow control mechanisms including dynamic security lattices, run-time code privileges and declassification, without modifying the base language. This design avoids the redundant work of producing new languages, lowers the threshold for adopting security-typed languages, and also provides great flexibility and modularity for using security-policy frameworks. The embedded security sublanguage is designed using a standard combinator interface called arrows. Computations constructed in the sublanguage have static and explicit control-flow components, making it possible to implement information-flow control using static-analysis techniques at run time, while providing strong security guarantees. This paper presents a concrete Haskell implementation and an example application demonstrating the proposed techniques.