Implementation of Faceted Values in Node.JS.

Information flow analysis is the study of mechanisms by which developers may protect sensitive data within an ecosystem containing untrusted third-party code. Secure multi-execution is one such mechanism that reliably prevents undesirable information flows, but a programmer’s use of secure multi-execution is itself challenging and prone to error. Faceted values have been shown to provide an alternative to secure multi-execution which is, in theory, functionally equivalent. The purpose of this work is to show that the theory holds in practice by implementing usable faceted values in JavaScript via source code transformation. The primary contribution of this project is to provide a library that makes these transformations possible in any standard JavaScript runtime without requiring native support. We build a pipeline that takes JavaScript code with syntactic support for faceted values and, through source code transformation, produces platform-independent JavaScript code containing functional faceted values. Our findings include a method by which we may optimize the use of faceted values through static analysis of the program’s information flow

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

Dynamic IFC Theorems for Free!

We show that noninterference and transparency, the key soundness theorems for dynamic IFC libraries, can be obtained "for free", as direct consequences of the more general parametricity theorem of type abstraction. This allows us to give very short soundness proofs for dynamic IFC libraries such as faceted values and LIO. Our proofs stay short even when fully mechanized for Agda implementations of the libraries in terms of type abstraction.Comment: CSF 2021 final versio

Secure Declassification in Faceted JavaScript

Information leaks currently represent a major security vulnerability. Malicious code, when injected into a trusted environment and executed in the context of the victim’s privileges, often results in the loss of sensitive information. To address this security issue, this paper focuses on the idea of information flow control using faceted execution [3]. This mechanism allows the interpreter to efficiently keep track of variables across multiple security levels, achieving termination-insensitive non-interference (TINI). With TINI, a program can only leak one bit of data, caused by the termination of a program. One key benefit of having faceted execution is that flow policy can be enforced automatically on the basis of its architecture, rather than relying on filtering, validation, and encoding, over user inputs. Despite the fact that information flow control ensures strong confidentiality, such a model is too restrictive for many real-world applications. Declassification offers one way of releasing sensitive information in a controlled manner. This paper introduces Faceted JS, a modified JavaScript language that supports basic JavaScript features as well as faceted executions. To demonstrate the proper way to release sensitive data, a declassification mechanism is implemented, based on the concept of the object capability model [12] and policy-agnostic programming [4]. Finally, we cover the aspect of implementation and offer some practical examples

Introducing Faceted Exception Handling for Dynamic Information Flow

JavaScript is most commonly used as a part of web browsers, especially client- side scripts interacting with the user. JavaScript is also the source of many security problems, which includes cross-site scripting attacks. The primary challenge is that code from untrusted sources run with full privileges on the client side, thus lead- ing to security breaches. This paper develops information flow controls with proper exception handling to prevent violations of data confidentiality and integrity. Faceted values are a mechanism to handle dynamic information flow security in a way that overcomes the limitations caused by dynamic execution, but previous work has not shown how to properly handle exceptions with faceted values. Sometimes there might be problems where high-security information can be inferred from a pro- gram\u27s control flow, or sometime the execution might crash while transferring this high-security information when there is an exception raised. Usage of faceted values is an experimental approach as an alternative to multi-process execution. This paper provides more detail on providing exception support to multi-faceted execution