1,919 research outputs found
Declassification of Faceted Values in JavaScript
This research addresses the issues with protecting sensitive information at the language level using information flow control mechanisms (IFC). Most of the IFC mechanisms face the challenge of releasing sensitive information in a restricted or limited manner. This research uses faceted values, an IFC mechanism that has shown promising flexibility for downgrading the confidential information in a secure manner, also called declassification.
In this project, we introduce the concept of first-class labels to simplify the declassification of faceted values. To validate the utility of our approach we show how the combination of faceted values and first-class labels can build various declassification mechanisms
The Anatomy and Facets of Dynamic Policies
Information flow policies are often dynamic; the security concerns of a
program will typically change during execution to reflect security-relevant
events. A key challenge is how to best specify, and give proper meaning to,
such dynamic policies. A large number of approaches exist that tackle that
challenge, each yielding some important, but unconnected, insight. In this work
we synthesise existing knowledge on dynamic policies, with an aim to establish
a common terminology, best practices, and frameworks for reasoning about them.
We introduce the concept of facets to illuminate subtleties in the semantics of
policies, and closely examine the anatomy of policies and the expressiveness of
policy specification mechanisms. We further explore the relation between
dynamic policies and the concept of declassification.Comment: Technical Report of publication under the same name in Computer
Security Foundations (CSF) 201
Checking Interaction-Based Declassification Policies for Android Using Symbolic Execution
Mobile apps can access a wide variety of secure information, such as contacts
and location. However, current mobile platforms include only coarse access
control mechanisms to protect such data. In this paper, we introduce
interaction-based declassification policies, in which the user's interactions
with the app constrain the release of sensitive information. Our policies are
defined extensionally, so as to be independent of the app's implementation,
based on sequences of security-relevant events that occur in app runs. Policies
use LTL formulae to precisely specify which secret inputs, read at which times,
may be released. We formalize a semantic security condition, interaction-based
noninterference, to define our policies precisely. Finally, we describe a
prototype tool that uses symbolic execution to check interaction-based
declassification policies for Android, and we show that it enforces policies
correctly on a set of apps.Comment: This research was supported in part by NSF grants CNS-1064997 and
1421373, AFOSR grants FA9550-12-1-0334 and FA9550-14-1-0334, a partnership
between UMIACS and the Laboratory for Telecommunication Sciences, and the
National Security Agenc
Just forget it - The semantics and enforcement of information erasure
Abstract. There are many settings in which sensitive information is made available to a system or organisation for a specific purpose, on the understanding that it will be erased once that purpose has been fulfilled. A familiar example is that of online credit card transactions: a customer typically provides credit card details to a payment system on the understanding that the following promises are kept: (i) Noninterference (NI): the card details may flow to the bank (in order that the payment can be authorised) but not to other users of the system; (ii) Erasure: the payment system will not retain any record of the card details once the transaction is complete. This example shows that we need to reason about NI and erasure in combination, and that we need to consider interactive systems: the card details are used in the interaction between the principals, and then erased; without the interaction, the card details could be dispensed with altogether and erasure would be unnecessary. The contributions of this paper are as follows. (i) We show that an end-to-end erasure property can be encoded as a “flow sensitive ” noninterference property. (ii) By a judicious choice of language construct to support erasur
A Semantic Hierarchy for Erasure Policies
We consider the problem of logical data erasure, contrasting with physical
erasure in the same way that end-to-end information flow control contrasts with
access control. We present a semantic hierarchy for erasure policies, using a
possibilistic knowledge-based semantics to define policy satisfaction such that
there is an intuitively clear upper bound on what information an erasure policy
permits to be retained. Our hierarchy allows a rich class of erasure policies
to be expressed, taking account of the power of the attacker, how much
information may be retained, and under what conditions it may be retained.
While our main aim is to specify erasure policies, the semantic framework
allows quite general information-flow policies to be formulated for a variety
of semantic notions of secrecy.Comment: 18 pages, ICISS 201
A Temporal Logic for Hyperproperties
Hyperproperties, as introduced by Clarkson and Schneider, characterize the
correctness of a computer program as a condition on its set of computation
paths. Standard temporal logics can only refer to a single path at a time, and
therefore cannot express many hyperproperties of interest, including
noninterference and other important properties in security and coding theory.
In this paper, we investigate an extension of temporal logic with explicit path
variables. We show that the quantification over paths naturally subsumes other
extensions of temporal logic with operators for information flow and knowledge.
The model checking problem for temporal logic with path quantification is
decidable. For alternation depth 1, the complexity is PSPACE in the length of
the formula and NLOGSPACE in the size of the system, as for linear-time
temporal logic
A Cut Principle for Information Flow
We view a distributed system as a graph of active locations with
unidirectional channels between them, through which they pass messages. In this
context, the graph structure of a system constrains the propagation of
information through it.
Suppose a set of channels is a cut set between an information source and a
potential sink. We prove that, if there is no disclosure from the source to the
cut set, then there can be no disclosure to the sink. We introduce a new
formalization of partial disclosure, called *blur operators*, and show that the
same cut property is preserved for disclosure to within a blur operator. This
cut-blur property also implies a compositional principle, which ensures limited
disclosure for a class of systems that differ only beyond the cut.Comment: 31 page
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