All Secrets Great and Small

Paper i proceeding, 2009

Tools for analysing secure information flow are almost exclusively based on ideas going back to Denning's work from the 70's. This approach embodies an imperfect notion of security which turns a blind eye to information flows which are encoded in the termination behaviour of a program. In exchange for this weakness many more programs are deemed "secure", using conditions which are easy to check. Previously it was thought that such leaks are limited to at most one bit per run. Recent work by Askarov et al (ESORICS'08) offers some bad news and some good news: the bad news is that for programs which perform output, the amount of information leaked by a Denning style analysis is not bounded; the good news is that if secrets are chosen to be sufficiently large and sufficiently random then they cannot be effectively leaked at all. The problem addressed in this paper is that secrets cannot always be made sufficiently large or sufficiently random. Contrast, for example, an encryption key with an "hasHIV"-field of a patient record. In recognition of this we develop a notion of secret-sensitive noninterference in which "small" secrets are handled more carefully than "big" ones. We illustrate the idea with a type system which combines a liberal Denning-style analysis with a more restrictive system according to the nature of the secrets at hand.