Statically checking confidentiality via dynamic labels

This paper presents a new approach for verifying confidentiality for programs, based on abstract interpretation. The framework is formally developed and proved correct in the theorem prover PVS. We use dynamic labeling functions to abstractly interpret a simple programming language via modification of security levels of variables. Our approach is sound and compositional and results in an algorithm for statically checking confidentiality

Combining behavioural types with security analysis

Today's software systems are highly distributed and interconnected, and they increasingly rely on communication to achieve their goals; due to their societal importance, security and trustworthiness are crucial aspects for the correctness of these systems. Behavioural types, which extend data types by describing also the structured behaviour of programs, are a widely studied approach to the enforcement of correctness properties in communicating systems. This paper offers a unified overview of proposals based on behavioural types which are aimed at the analysis of security properties

Specifying and Analysing SOC Applications with COWS

COWS is a recently defined process calculus for specifying and combining service-oriented applications, while modelling their dynamic behaviour. Since its introduction, a number of methods and tools have been devised to analyse COWS specifications, like e.g. a type system to check confidentiality properties, a logic and a model checker to express and check functional properties of services. In this paper, by means of a case study in the area of automotive systems, we demonstrate that COWS, with some mild linguistic additions, can model all the phases of the life cycle of service-oriented applications, such as publication, discovery, negotiation, orchestration, deployment, reconfiguration and execution. We also provide a flavour of the properties that can be analysed by using the tools mentioned above

Tracking sensitive and untrustworthy data in IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) produces and processes large amounts of data. Among these data, some must be protected and others must be carefully handled because they come from untrusted sources. Taint analysis techniques can be used to for marking data and for monitoring their propagation at run time, so to determine how they influence the rest of the computation. Starting from the specification language IoT-LySa, we propose a Control Flow Analysis for statically predicting how tainted data spread across an IoT system and for checking whether those computations considered security critical are not affected by tainted data

LJGS: Gradual Security Types for Object-Oriented Languages

LJGS is a lightweight Java core calculus with a gradual security type system. The calculus guarantees secure information flow for sequential, class-based, typed object-oriented programming with mutable objects and virtual method calls. An LJGS program is composed of fragments that are checked either statically or dynamically. Statically checked fragments adhere to a security type system so that they incur no run-time penalty whereas dynamically checked fragments rely on run-time security labels. The programmer marks the boundaries between static and dynamic checking with casts so that it is always clear whether a program fragment requires run-time checks. LJGS requires security annotations on fields and methods. A field annotation either specifies a fixed static security level or it prescribes dynamic checking. A method annotation specifies a constrained polymorphic security signature. The types of local variables in method bodies are analyzed flow-sensitively and require no annotation. The dynamic checking of fields relies on a static points-to analysis to approximate implicit flows. We prove type soundness and non-interference for LJGS

A Calculus for Orchestration of Web Services

Service-oriented computing, an emerging paradigm for distributed computing based on the use of services, is calling for the development of tools and techniques to build safe and trustworthy systems, and to analyse their behaviour. Therefore, many researchers have proposed to use process calculi, a cornerstone of current foundational research on specification and analysis of concurrent, reactive, and distributed systems. In this paper, we follow this approach and introduce CWS, a process calculus expressly designed for specifying and combining service-oriented applications, while modelling their dynamic behaviour. We show that CWS can model all the phases of the life cycle of service-oriented applications, such as publication, discovery, negotiation, orchestration, deployment, reconfiguration and execution. We illustrate the specification style that CWS supports by means of a large case study from the automotive domain and a number of more specific examples drawn from it

PLACES'10: The 3rd Workshop on Programmng Language Approaches to concurrency and Communication-Centric Software

Paphos, Cyprus. March 201