We are family: Relating information-flow trackers

While information-flow security is a well-established area, there is an unsettling gap between heavyweight information-flow control, with formal guarantees yet limited practical impact, and lightweight tainting techniques, useful for bug finding yet lacking formal assurance. This paper proposes a framework for exploring the middle ground in the range of enforcement from tainting (tracking data flows only) to fully-fledged information-flow control (tracking both data and control flows). We formally illustrate the trade-offs between the soundness and permissiveness that the framework allows to achieve. The framework is deployed in a staged fashion, statically embedding a dynamic monitor, being parametric in security policies, as they do not need to be fixed until the final deployment. This flexibility facilitates a secure app store architecture, where the static stage of verification is performed by the app store and the dynamic stage is deployed on the client. To illustrate the practicality of the framework, we implement our approach for a core of Java and evaluate it on a use case with enforcing privacy policies in the Android setting. We also show how a state-of-the-art dynamic monitor for JavaScript can be easily adapted to implement our approach. \ua9 2017, Springer International Publishing AG

Mechanisms of immunomodulation by mammalian and viral decoy receptors: insights from structures

International audienceImmune responses are regulated by effector cytokines and chemokines that signal through cell surface receptors. Mammalian decoy receptors — which are typically soluble or inactive versions of cell surface receptors or soluble protein modules termed binding proteins — modulate and antagonize signalling by canonical effector–receptor complexes. Viruses have developed a diverse array of molecular decoys to evade host immune responses; these include viral homologues of host cytokines, chemokines and chemokine receptors; variants of host receptors with new functions; and novel decoy receptors that do not have host counterparts. Over the past decade, the number of known mammalian and viral decoy receptors has increased considerably, yet a comprehensive curation of the corresponding structure–mechanism relationships has not been carried out. In this Review, we provide a comprehensive resource on this topic with a view to better understanding the roles and evolutionary relationships of mammalian and viral decoy receptors, and the opportunities for leveraging their therapeutic potential