Explicit Secrecy: A Policy for Taint Tracking
Paper i proceeding, 2016

Taint tracking is a popular security mechanism for tracking data-flow dependencies, both in high-level languages and at the machine code level. But despite the many taint trackers in practical use, the question of what, exactly, tainting means-what security policy it embodies-remains largely unexplored. We propose explicit secrecy, a generic framework capturing the essence of explicit flows, i.e., the data flows tracked by tainting. The framework is semantic, generalizing previous syntactic approaches to formulating soundness criteria of tainting. We demonstrate the usefulness of the framework by instantiating it with both a simple high-level imperative language and an idealized RISC machine. To further understanding of what is achieved by taint tracking tools, both dynamic and static, we obtain soundness results with respect to explicit secrecy for the tainting engine cores of a collection of popular dynamic and static taint trackers.

Theory & Methods

Engineering

Electrical & Electronic

Computer Science

Författare

Daniel Schoepe

Chalmers, Data- och informationsteknik, Datavetenskap

Musard Balliu

Chalmers, Data- och informationsteknik, Programvaruteknik

B. C. Pierce

Andrei Sabelfeld

Chalmers, Data- och informationsteknik, Programvaruteknik

1st IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (Euro S&P), Saarbruecken, Germany, Mar 21-24, 2016

15-30
978-1-5090-1752-2 (ISBN)

Styrkeområden

Informations- och kommunikationsteknik

Fundament

Grundläggande vetenskaper

Ämneskategorier

Geofysik

DOI

10.1109/EuroSP.2016.14

ISBN

978-1-5090-1752-2

Mer information

Skapat

2017-10-08