Information-Flow Security for Interactive Programs

  • Authors:
  • Kevin R. O'Neill;Michael R. Clarkson;Stephen Chong

  • Affiliations:
  • Cornell University, USA;Cornell University, USA;Cornell University, USA

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

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Abstract

Interactive programs allow users to engage in input and output throughout execution. The ubiquity of such programs motivates the development of models for reasoning about their information-flow security, yet no such models seem to exist for imperative programming languages. Further, existing language-based security conditions founded on noninteractive models permit insecure information flows in interactive imperative programs. This paper formulates new strategy-based information-flow security conditions for a simple imperative programming language that includes input and output operators. The semantics of the language enables a fine-grained approach to the resolution of nondeterministic choices. The security conditions leverage this approach to prohibit refinement attacks while still permitting observable nondeterminism. Extending the language with probabilistic choice yields a corresponding definition of probabilistic noninterference. A soundness theorem demonstrates the feasibility of statically enforcing the security conditions via a simple type system. These results constitute a step toward understanding and enforcing information-flow security in real-world programming languages, which include similar input and output operators