Compositional Information-flow Security for Interactive Systems
Paper in proceeding, 2014

To achieve end-to-end security in a system built from parts, it is important to ensure that the composition of secure components is itself secure. This work investigates the compositionality of two popular conditions of possibilistic noninterference. The first condition, progress-insensitive noninterference (PINI), is the security condition enforced by practical tools like JSFlow, Paragon, sequential LIO, Jif, Flow Caml, and SPARK Examiner. We show that this condition is not preserved under fair parallel composition: composing a PINI system fairly with another PINI system can yield an insecure system. We explore constraints that allow recovering compositionality for PINI. Further, we develop a theory of compositional reasoning. In contrast to PINI, we show what PSNI behaves well under composition, with and without fairness assumptions. Our work is performed within a general framework for nondeterministic interactive systems.

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)

277-292
978-1-4799-4290-9 (ISBN)

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Subject Categories

Computer and Information Science

Roots

Basic sciences

DOI

10.1109/CSF.2014.27

ISBN

978-1-4799-4290-9

More information

Latest update

1/3/2024 9