Information Flow Tracking for Side-Effectful Libraries
Paper in proceeding, 2018

Dynamic information flow control is a promising technique for ensuring
confidentiality and integrity of applications that manipulate sensitive
information. While much progress has been made on increasingly powerful
programming languages ranging from low-level machine languages to high-level
languages for distributed systems, surprisingly little attention has been
devoted to libraries and APIs. The state of the art is largely an
all-or-nothing choice: either a shallow or deep library
modeling approach. Seeking to break out of this restrictive choice, we
formalize a general mechanism that tracks information flow for a language
that includes higher-order functions, structured data types and references.
A key feature of our approach is the model heap, a part of the
memory, where security information is kept to enable the interaction between
the labeled program and the unlabeled library. We provide a
proof-of-concept implementation and report on experiments with a file system
library. The system has been proved correct using Coq.

Side-effectful Libraries

Language-Based Security

Information Flow Control

Author

Alexander Sjösten

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

Daniel Hedin

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

Andrei Sabelfeld

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

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

03029743 (ISSN) 16113349 (eISSN)

Vol. 10854 LNCS 141-160
978-3-319-92611-7 (ISBN)

38th IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference on Formal Techniques for Distributed Objects, Components, and Systems, FORTE 2018
Madrid, Spain,

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Subject Categories

Computer and Information Science

DOI

10.1007/978-3-319-92612-4_8

More information

Latest update

9/17/2024