104 research outputs found
Complexity and Unwinding for Intransitive Noninterference
The paper considers several definitions of information flow security for
intransitive policies from the point of view of the complexity of verifying
whether a finite-state system is secure. The results are as follows. Checking
(i) P-security (Goguen and Meseguer), (ii) IP-security (Haigh and Young), and
(iii) TA-security (van der Meyden) are all in PTIME, while checking TO-security
(van der Meyden) is undecidable, as is checking ITO-security (van der Meyden).
The most important ingredients in the proofs of the PTIME upper bounds are new
characterizations of the respective security notions, which also lead to new
unwinding proof techniques that are shown to be sound and complete for these
notions of security, and enable the algorithms to return simple
counter-examples demonstrating insecurity. Our results for IP-security improve
a previous doubly exponential bound of Hadj-Alouane et al
Opacity with Orwellian Observers and Intransitive Non-interference
Opacity is a general behavioural security scheme flexible enough to account
for several specific properties. Some secret set of behaviors of a system is
opaque if a passive attacker can never tell whether the observed behavior is a
secret one or not. Instead of considering the case of static observability
where the set of observable events is fixed off line or dynamic observability
where the set of observable events changes over time depending on the history
of the trace, we consider Orwellian partial observability where unobservable
events are not revealed unless a downgrading event occurs in the future of the
trace. We show how to verify that some regular secret is opaque for a regular
language L w.r.t. an Orwellian projection while it has been proved undecidable
even for a regular language L w.r.t. a general Orwellian observation function.
We finally illustrate relevancy of our results by proving the equivalence
between the opacity property of regular secrets w.r.t. Orwellian projection and
the intransitive non-interference property
Information Security as Strategic (In)effectivity
Security of information flow is commonly understood as preventing any
information leakage, regardless of how grave or harmless consequences the
leakage can have. In this work, we suggest that information security is not a
goal in itself, but rather a means of preventing potential attackers from
compromising the correct behavior of the system. To formalize this, we first
show how two information flows can be compared by looking at the adversary's
ability to harm the system. Then, we propose that the information flow in a
system is effectively information-secure if it does not allow for more harm
than its idealized variant based on the classical notion of noninterference
Verification of Information Flow Properties under Rational Observation
Information flow properties express the capability for an agent to infer
information about secret behaviours of a partially observable system. In a
language-theoretic setting, where the system behaviour is described by a
language, we define the class of rational information flow properties (RIFP),
where observers are modeled by finite transducers, acting on languages in a
given family . This leads to a general decidability criterion for
the verification problem of RIFPs on , implying
PSPACE-completeness for this problem on regular languages. We show that most
trace-based information flow properties studied up to now are RIFPs, including
those related to selective declassification and conditional anonymity. As a
consequence, we retrieve several existing decidability results that were
obtained by ad-hoc proofs.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures, version extended from AVOCS'201
Nontransitive Policies Transpiled
Nontransitive Noninterference (NTNI) and Nontransitive Types (NTT) are a new security condition and enforcement for policies which, in contrast to Denning\u27s classical lattice model, assume no transitivity of the underlying flow relation. Nontransitive security policies are a natural fit for coarse-grained information-flow control where labels are specified at module rather than variable level of granularity.While the nontransitive and transitive policies pursue different goals and have different intuitions, this paper demonstrates that nontransitive noninterference can in fact be reduced to classical transitive noninterference. We develop a lattice encoding that establishes a precise relation between NTNI and classical noninterference. Our results make it possible to clearly position the new NTNI characterization with respect to the large body of work on noninterference. Further, we devise a lightweight program transformation that leverages standard flow-sensitive information-flow analyses to enforce nontransitive policies. We demonstrate several immediate benefits of our approach, both theoretical and practical. First, we improve the permissiveness over (while retaining the soundness of) the nonstandard NTT enforcement. Second, our results naturally generalize to a language with intermediate inputs and outputs. Finally, we demonstrate the practical benefits by utilizing state-of-the-art flow-sensitive tool JOANA to enforce nontransitive policies for Java programs
Noninterference in Concurrent Game Structures
Noninterference is a technique to formally capture the intuitive notion of information flow in the context of security. Information does not flow from one agent to another if the actions of the first have no impact on the future observations of the second. Various formulations of this notion have been proposed based on state machines and the removal of actions from action sequences. A new model known as the concurrent game structure [CGS] has recently been introduced for analysis multi-agent systems. We propose an alternate formulation of noninterference defined for systems modeled by CGS\u27s and analyze the impact of the new approach on noninterference research based on existing definitions
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