Secure multi-execution: Fine-grained, declassification-aware, and transparent
Paper in proceeding, 2013

Recently, much progress has been made on achieving information-flow security via secure multi-execution. Secure multi-execution (SME) is an elegant way to enforce security by executing a given program multiple times, once for each security level, while carefully dispatching inputs and ensuring that an execution at a given level is responsible for producing outputs for information sinks at that level. Secure multi-execution guarantees noninterference, in the sense of no dependencies from secret inputs to public outputs, and transparency, in the sense that if a program is secure then its secure multi-execution does not destroy its original behavior. This paper pushes the boundary of what can be achieved with secure multi-execution. First, we lift the assumption from the original secure multi-execution work on the totality of the input environment (that there is always assumed to be input) and on the cooperative scheduling. Second, we generalize secure multi-execution to distinguish between security levels of presence and content of messages. Third, we introduce a declassification model for secure multi-execution that allows expressing what information can be released. Fourth, we establish a full transparency result showing how secure multi-execution can preserve the original order of messages in secure programs. We demonstrate that full transparency is a key enabler for discovering attacks with secure multi-execution.

Author

Willard Thor Rafnsson

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Software Technology (Chalmers)

Andrei Sabelfeld

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Software Technology (Chalmers)

Proceedings. The Computer Security Foundations Workshop III

1063-6900 (ISSN)

33-48
978-0-7695-5031-2 (ISBN)

Subject Categories

Computer and Information Science

DOI

10.1109/CSF.2013.10

ISBN

978-0-7695-5031-2

More information

Latest update

10/5/2023