Andrei Sabelfeld, Andrew C. Myers
Cornell
Language-Based Information-Flow Security
URL: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/papers/jsac/sm-jsac03.ps
Current standard security practices do
not provide substantial assurance that
the end-to-end behavior of a computing
system satisfies important security
policies such as confidentiality. An
end-to-end confidentiality policy
might assert that secret input data
cannot be inferred by an attacker
through the attacker's observations of
system output; this policy regulates
information flow.
Conventional security mechanisms such
as access control and encryption do
not directly address the enforcement
of information-flow
policies. Recently, a promising new
approach has been developed: the use
of programming-language techniques for
specifying and enforcing
information-flow policies. In this
article we survey the past three
decades of research on
information-flow security,
particularly focusing on work that
uses static program analysis to
enforce information-flow policies. We
give a structured view of recent work
in the area and identify some
important open challenges.
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