MAC A verified static information-flow control library
Journal article, 2018

The programming language Haskell plays a unique, privileged role in information-flow control (IFC) research: it is able to enforce information security via libraries. Many state-of-the-art IFC libraries (e.g., LIO and HLIO) support a variety of advanced features like mutable data structures, exceptions, and concurrency, whose subtle interaction makes verification of security guarantees challenging. In this work, we focus on MAC, a statically-enforced IFC library for Haskell. In MAC, like other IFC libraries, computations have a well-established algebraic structure for computations (i.e., monads) responsible to manipulate labeled values values coming from an abstract data type which associates a sensitivity label to a piece of information. In this work, we enrich labeled values with a functor structure and provide an applicative functor operator which encourages a more functional programming style and simplifies code. Furthermore, we present a full-fledged, mechanically-verified model of MAC. Specifically, we show progress-insensitive noninterference for our sequential calculus and pinpoint sufficient requirements on the scheduler to prove progress-sensitive noninterference for our concurrent calculus. For that, we study the security guarantees of MAC using term erasure, a proof technique that ensures that the same public output should be produced if secrets are erased before or after program execution. As another contribution, we extend term erasure with two-steps erasure, a flexible novel technique that greatly simplifies the noninterference proof and helps to prove many advanced features of MAC.

Information Flow Control

Agda

Non Interference

Haskell

Functional Programming

Author

Marco Vassena

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Information Security

Alejandro Russo

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Information Security

Pablo Buiras

Harvard University

Lucas Waye

Harvard University

Journal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming

2352-2208 (ISSN) 2352-2216 (eISSN)

Vol. 95 148-180

Subject Categories

Other Computer and Information Science

Information Studies

Computer Science

DOI

10.1016/j.jlamp.2017.12.003

More information

Latest update

10/23/2022