PrinSec: Principled Security for Emerging Application Domains

Research Project, 2019 – 2022

Recent years have seen a proliferation of research on information flow control. While the progress has been tremendous, it has also given birth to a bewildering breed of concepts, policies, conditions, and enforcement mechanisms. Thus, when designing information flow controls for a new application domain, the designer is confronted with two basic questions: (i) What is the right security characterization for a new application domain? and (ii) What is the right enforcement for a new application domain?The project aims to develop a principled, semantic framework for designing information flow characterizations and enforcement mechanisms. The framework will enable us to roadmap security definitions and enforcement mechanisms, weed out inconsistencies from the folklore, and provide a well-grounded rationale for designing information flow policies and mechanisms for new application domains. We propose six principles to underly our framework: attacker-driven security, trust-aware security enforcement, separation of policy annotations and code, language-independence, justified abstraction, and permissiveness. We will integrate the framework with OS-based mechanisms, to make it suitable for deployment in resource-aware environments. Finally, the project will leverage the framework for modeling and enforcing security for the popular emerging domains of IoT and in-car apps.