Data-Centric Refinement of Information Flow Analysis of Database Applications

Abstract

In the recent age of information, most of the applications are associated with external database states. The confidentiality of sensitive database information may be compromised due to the influence of sensitive attributes on insensitive ones during the computation by database statements. Existing language-based approaches to capture possible leakage of sensitive database information are coarse-grained and are based on the assumption that attackers are able to view all values of insensitive attributes in the database. In this paper, we propose a data-centric approach which covers more generic scenarios where attackers are able to view only a part of the attribute-values according to the policy. This leads to more precise semantic-based analysis which reduces false positives with respect to the literature.