Abstract
Initiating from the seminal work of Volpano and Smith, there has been ample evidence that type systems may be used to enforce confidentiality of programs through non-interference. However, most type systems operate on high-level languages and calculi, and “low-level languages have not received much attention in studies of secure information flow” (Sabelfeld and Myers [16]). Further, security type systems for low-level languages should appropriately relate to their counterparts for high-level languages; however, we are not aware of any study of type-preserving compilers for type systems for information flow.
In answer to these questions, we introduce a security type system for a low-level language featuring jumps and calls, and show that the type system enforces termination-insensitive non-interference. Then, we introduce a compiler from a high-level imperative programming language to our low-level language, and show that the compiler preserves security types.
Work partially supported by IST Projects Profundis and Verificard.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ball, T.: What’s in a region? Or computing control dependence regions in nearlinear time for reducible control flow. ACM Letters on Programming Languages and Systems 2(1–4), 1–16 (1993)
Banerjee, A., Naumann, D.A.: Secure Information Flow and Pointer Confinement in a Java-like Language. In: Proceedings of CSFW 2002, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (2002)
Barthe, G., Serpette, B.: Partial evaluation and non-interference for object calculi. In: Middeldorp, A. (ed.) FLOPS 1999. LNCS, vol. 1722, pp. 53–67. Springer, Heidelberg (1999)
Bernardeschi, C., De Francesco, N.: Combining Abstract Interpretation and Model Checking for analysing Security Properties of Java Bytecode. In: Cortesi, A. (ed.) VMCAI 2002. LNCS, vol. 2294, pp. 1–15. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Bieber, P., Cazin, J., Wiels, V., Zanon, G., Girard, P., Lanet, J.-L.: Checking Secure Interactions of Smart Card Applets: Extended version. Journal of Computer Security 10, 369–398 (2002)
Coglio, A.: Simple Verification Technique for Complex Java Bytecode Subroutines. In: Proceedings of FTFJP 2002 (2002)
Goguen, J., Meseguer, J.: Security policies and security models. In: Proceedings of SOSP 1982, pp. 11–22. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (1982)
Heintze, N., Riecke, J.: The SLam calculus: programming with secrecy and integrity. In: Proceedings of POPL 1998, pp. 365–377. ACM Press, New York (1998)
Honda, K., Yoshida, N.: A Uniform Type Structure for Secure Information Flow. In: Proceedings of POPL 2002, pp. 81–92. ACM Press, New York (2002)
League, C., Shao, Z., Trifonov, V.: Precision in Practice: A Type-Preserving Java Compiler. In: Hedin, G. (ed.) CC 2003. LNCS, vol. 2622, pp. 106–120. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Leroy, X.: Java bytecode verification: an overview. In: Berry, G., Comon, H., Finkel, A. (eds.) CAV 2001. LNCS, vol. 2102, pp. 265–285. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Myers, A.C.: Jflow: Practical mostly-static information flow control. In: Proceedings of POPL 1999, pp. 228–241. ACM Press, New York (1999)
Necula, G.C.: Proof-Carrying Code. In: Proceedings of POPL 1997, pp. 106–119. ACM Press, New York (1997)
Necula, G.C., Lee, P.: The Design and Implementation of a Certifying Compiler. In: Proceedings of PLDI 1998, pp. 333–344 (1998)
Pottier, F., Simonet, V.: Information flow inference for ML. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems 25(1), 117–158 (2003)
Sabelfeld, A., Myers, A.: Language-Based Information-Flow Security. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Comunications 21, 5–19 (2003)
Simonet, V.: Fine-grained Information Flow Analysis for a Lambda-Calculus with Sum Types. In: Proceedings of CSFW 2002, pp. 223–237 (2002)
Volpano, D., Smith, G.: A Type-Based Approach to Program Security. In: Bidoit, M., Dauchet, M. (eds.) CAAP 1997, FASE 1997, and TAPSOFT 1997. LNCS, vol. 1214, pp. 607–621. Springer, Heidelberg (1997)
Volpano, D., Smith, G.: Eliminating covert flows with minimum typings. In: Proceedings of CSFW 1997, pp. 156–168. IEEE Press, Los Alamitos (1997)
Volpano, D., Smith, G., Irvine, C.: A Sound Type System for Secure Flow Analysis. Journal of Computer Security, 167–187 (December 1996)
Zdancewic, S., Myers, A.: Secure information flow and CPS. In: Sands, D. (ed.) ESOP 2001. LNCS, vol. 2028, pp. 46–61. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Barthe, G., Basu, A., Rezk, T. (2004). Security Types Preserving Compilation. In: Steffen, B., Levi, G. (eds) Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation. VMCAI 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2937. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24622-0_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24622-0_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-20803-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-24622-0
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive