1,943 research outputs found
Information Flow Control in WebKit's JavaScript Bytecode
Websites today routinely combine JavaScript from multiple sources, both
trusted and untrusted. Hence, JavaScript security is of paramount importance. A
specific interesting problem is information flow control (IFC) for JavaScript.
In this paper, we develop, formalize and implement a dynamic IFC mechanism for
the JavaScript engine of a production Web browser (specifically, Safari's
WebKit engine). Our IFC mechanism works at the level of JavaScript bytecode and
hence leverages years of industrial effort on optimizing both the source to
bytecode compiler and the bytecode interpreter. We track both explicit and
implicit flows and observe only moderate overhead. Working with bytecode
results in new challenges including the extensive use of unstructured control
flow in bytecode (which complicates lowering of program context taints),
unstructured exceptions (which complicate the matter further) and the need to
make IFC analysis permissive. We explain how we address these challenges,
formally model the JavaScript bytecode semantics and our instrumentation, prove
the standard property of termination-insensitive non-interference, and present
experimental results on an optimized prototype
Possibilistic Information Flow Control for Workflow Management Systems
In workflows and business processes, there are often security requirements on
both the data, i.e. confidentiality and integrity, and the process, e.g.
separation of duty. Graphical notations exist for specifying both workflows and
associated security requirements. We present an approach for formally verifying
that a workflow satisfies such security requirements. For this purpose, we
define the semantics of a workflow as a state-event system and formalise
security properties in a trace-based way, i.e. on an abstract level without
depending on details of enforcement mechanisms such as Role-Based Access
Control (RBAC). This formal model then allows us to build upon well-known
verification techniques for information flow control. We describe how a
compositional verification methodology for possibilistic information flow can
be adapted to verify that a specification of a distributed workflow management
system satisfies security requirements on both data and processes.Comment: In Proceedings GraMSec 2014, arXiv:1404.163
Plugging Side-Channel Leaks with Timing Information Flow Control
The cloud model's dependence on massive parallelism and resource sharing
exacerbates the security challenge of timing side-channels. Timing Information
Flow Control (TIFC) is a novel adaptation of IFC techniques that may offer a
way to reason about, and ultimately control, the flow of sensitive information
through systems via timing channels. With TIFC, objects such as files,
messages, and processes carry not just content labels describing the ownership
of the object's "bits," but also timing labels describing information contained
in timing events affecting the object, such as process creation/termination or
message reception. With two system design tools-deterministic execution and
pacing queues-TIFC enables the construction of "timing-hardened" cloud
infrastructure that permits statistical multiplexing, while aggregating and
rate-limiting timing information leakage between hosted computations.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure
Cryptographically Secure Information Flow Control on Key-Value Stores
We present Clio, an information flow control (IFC) system that transparently
incorporates cryptography to enforce confidentiality and integrity policies on
untrusted storage. Clio insulates developers from explicitly manipulating keys
and cryptographic primitives by leveraging the policy language of the IFC
system to automatically use the appropriate keys and correct cryptographic
operations. We prove that Clio is secure with a novel proof technique that is
based on a proof style from cryptography together with standard programming
languages results. We present a prototype Clio implementation and a case study
that demonstrates Clio's practicality.Comment: Full version of conference paper appearing in CCS 201
Information flow control in cloud computing
Abstract-Cloud computing is an emerging computing paradigm where computing resources are provided as services over Internet while residing in a large data center. Even though it enables us to dynamically provide servers with the ability to address a wide range of needs, this paradigm brings forth many new challenges for the data security and access control as users outsource their sensitive data to clouds, which are beyond the same trusted domain as data owners. A fundamental problem is the existence of insecure information flows due to the fact that a service provider can access multiple virtual machines in clouds. Sensitive information may be leaked to unauthorized customers and such critical information flows could raise conflict-of-interest issues in cloud computing. In this paper, we propose an approach to enforce the infor mation flow policies at Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) layer in a cloud computing environment. Especially, we adopt Chinese Wall policies to address the problems of insecure information flow. We implement a proof-of-concept prototype system based on Eucalyptus open source packages to show the feasibility of our approach. This system facilitates the cloud management modules to resolve the conflict-of-interest issues for service providers in clouds. I
JRIF: Reactive Information Flow Control for Java
A reactive information flow (RIF) automaton for a value v specifies (i) allowed uses for v and (ii) the RIF automaton for any value that might be directly or indirectly derived from v. RIF automata thus specify how transforming a value alters how the result might be used. Such labels are more expressive than existing approaches for controlling downgrading. We devised a type system around RIF automata and incorporated it into Jif, a dialect of Java that supports a classic form of labels for information flow. By implementing a compiler for the resulting JRIF language, we demonstrate how easy it is to replace a classic information-flow type system by a more expressive RIF-based type system. We programmed two example applications in JRIF, and we discuss insights they provide into the benefits of RIF-based security labels.Supported in part by AFOSR grants F9550-06-0019 and FA9550-11-1-0137, National Science Foundation grants 0430161, 0964409, and CCF-0424422 (TRUST), ONR grants N00014-01- 1-0968 and N00014-09-1-0652, and grants from Microsoft
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