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Assessing security threats of looping constructs

Published: 17 January 2007 Publication History

Abstract

There is a clear intuitive connection between the notion of leakage of information in a program and concepts from information theory. This intuition has not been satisfactorily pinned down, until now. In particular, previous information-theoretic models of programs are imprecise, due to their overly conservative treatment of looping constructs. In this paper we provide the first precise information-theoretic semantics of looping constructs. Our semantics describes both the amount and rate of leakage; if either is small enough, then a program might be deemed "secure". Using the semantics we provide an investigation and classification of bounded and unbounded covert channels.

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
POPL '07: Proceedings of the 34th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
January 2007
400 pages
ISBN:1595935754
DOI:10.1145/1190216
  • cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
    ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 42, Issue 1
    Proceedings of the 2007 POPL Conference
    January 2007
    379 pages
    ISSN:0362-1340
    EISSN:1558-1160
    DOI:10.1145/1190215
    Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 17 January 2007

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Author Tags

  1. information theory
  2. language semantics
  3. security

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Overall Acceptance Rate 824 of 4,130 submissions, 20%

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Cited By

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  • (2024)The Privacy-Utility Trade-off in the Topics APIProceedings of the 2024 on ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3658644.3670368(1106-1120)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2024
  • (2023)A Novel Analysis of Utility in Privacy Pipelines, Using Kronecker Products and Quantitative Information FlowProceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3576915.3623081(1718-1731)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2023
  • (2022)Common Programming Mistakes Leading to Information Disclosure: A Preliminary Study2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER53432.2022.00091(743-747)Online publication date: Mar-2022
  • (2021)Upper Bound Computation of Information Leakages for Unbounded RecursionSoftware Engineering and Formal Methods10.1007/978-3-030-92124-8_10(160-177)Online publication date: 3-Dec-2021
  • (2019)Comparing Systems: Max-Case Refinement Orders and Application to Differential Privacy2019 IEEE 32nd Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF)10.1109/CSF.2019.00037(442-44215)Online publication date: Jun-2019
  • (2019)Hybrid statistical estimation of mutual information and its application to information flowFormal Aspects of Computing10.1007/s00165-018-0469-z31:2(165-206)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2019
  • (2019)A Formal Analysis of Timing Channel Security via BucketingUrbanization and Its Impact in Contemporary China10.1007/978-3-030-17138-4_2(29-50)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2019
  • (2018)Static Evaluation of Noninterference Using Approximate Model Counting2018 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP.2018.00052(514-528)Online publication date: May-2018
  • (2018)On the Additive Capacity Problem for Quantitative Information FlowQuantitative Evaluation of Systems10.1007/978-3-319-99154-2_1(1-19)Online publication date: 15-Aug-2018
  • (2018)Model Checking Quantitative HyperpropertiesComputer Aided Verification10.1007/978-3-319-96145-3_8(144-163)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2018
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