Paralocks: Role-based information flow control and beyond

Paper in proceeding, 2010

This paper presents Paralocks, a language for building expressive but statically verifiable fine-grained information flow policies. Paralocks combine the expressive power of Flow Locks (Broberg & Sands, ESOP'06) with the ability to express policies involving run-time principles, roles (in the style of role-based access control), and relations (such as "acts-for" in discretionary access control). We illustrate the Paralocks policy language by giving a simple encoding of Myers and Liskov's Decentralized Label Model (DLM). Furthermore - and unlike the DLM - we provide an information flow semantics for full Paralock policies. Lastly we illustrate how Paralocks can be statically verified by providing a simple programming language incorporating Paralock policy specifications, and a static type system which soundly enforces information flow security according to the Paralock semantics.