Information Flow Control Mechanism Research Articles

AT-DIFC + : Toward Adaptive and Trust-Aware Decentralized Information Flow Control

Modern software systems and their corresponding architectures are increasingly decentralized, distributed, and dynamic. As a consequence, decentralized mechanisms are required to ensure security in such architectures. Decentralized Information Flow Control (DIFC) is a mechanism to control information flow in distributed systems. This article presents and discusses several improvements to an adaptive decentralized information flow approach that incorporates trust for decentralized systems to provide security. Adaptive Trust-Aware Decentralized Information Flow (AT-DIFC + ) combines decentralized information flow control mechanisms, trust-based methods, and decentralized control architectures to control and enforce information flow in an open, decentralized system. We strengthen our approach against newly discovered attacks and provide additional information about its reconfiguration, decentralized control architectures, and reference implementation. We evaluate the effectiveness and performance of AT-DIFC + on two case studies and perform additional experiments and to gauge the mitigations’ effectiveness against the identified attacks.

Secure Service Composition with Quantitative Information Flow Evaluation in Mobile Computing Environments.

The advances in mobile technologies enable mobile devices to cooperate with each other to perform complex tasks to satisfy users’ composite service requirements. However, data with different sensitivities and heterogeneous systems with diverse security policies pose a great challenge on information flow security during the service composition across multiple mobile devices. The qualitative information flow control mechanism based on non-interference provides a solid security assurance on the propagation of customer’s private data across multiple service participants. However, strict discipline limits the service availability and may cause a high failure rate on service composition. Therefore, we propose a distributed quantitative information flow evaluation approach for service composition across multiple devices in mobile environments. The quantitative approach provides us a more precise way to evaluate the leakage and supports the customized disciplines on information flow security for the diverse requirements of different customers. Considering the limited energy feature on mobile devices, we use a distributed evaluation approach to provide a better balance on consumption on each service participant. Through the experiments and evaluations, the results indicate that our approach can improve the availability of composite service effectively while the security can be ensured.

Fine-grained information flow control using attributes

Information flow control (IFC) mechanisms regulate where information is allowed to travel. To enhance IFC, access control encryption (ACE) was proposed where both the no write-down rule and the no read-up rule are supported. Nevertheless, there are still two issues: (1) how to determine whether a communication request should be permitted or denied was not considered; (2) the commutation cost is linear with the number of receivers.Attribute-based system (ABS) can implement one-to-many communication and fine-grained access policies. In this paper, a new IFC scheme is proposed by combing ACE with ABS. Our scheme provides the following features: (1) IFC policies are defined over a universe set of attributes; (2) the computation cost to determine whether a communication request should be permitted or denied is constant, instead of linear with the number of required attributes or receivers; (3) weak attribute privacy is achieved; (4) fine-grained access policies on encrypted data are supported; (5) the communication cost is linear with the number of required attributes and is independent of the number of receivers. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first IFC scheme enforced by using attributes.

Secure‐CamFlow: A device‐oriented security model to assist information flow control systems in cloud environments for IoTs

SummaryRecent developments in the cloud technologies have motivated the migration of distributed large systems, specifically the Internet of Things to the cloud architecture. Since Internet of Things consist of a vast network and variety of objects, the cloud platform proves to be an ideal option. It is essential for the proper functioning of the Internet of Things to be able to share data among the system processes. The biggest problem faced during the transition of the IoTs to the cloud is the security of data especially while data sharing within the cloud and among its tenants. Information Flow Control mechanisms are one of the many solutions to enable a controlled sharing of data. Integration of Information Flow Control Systems to the existing architecture requires various levels of re‐engineering efforts. Moreover, most of the Information Flow Control systems focus on data flow within the cloud and neglect the security and integrity of data while it is being transferred to the cloud from various devices. This research focuses on securing the entire process of data migration to cloud from devices while the in‐cloud data flow is monitored by the Information Flow Control policies specified by the users. We have developed a prototype for the proposed model, and results are evaluated on the basis of energy consumption and execution time. As proposed model provides security services such as privacy, integrity, and authentication, hence it takes more execution time and consumes more energy as compared with the existing model.

Mandatory Content Access Control for Privacy Protection in Information Centric Networks

Several Information Centric Network (ICN) architectures have been proposed as candidates for the future Internet, aiming to solve several salient problems in the current IP-based Internet architecture such as mobility, content dissemination and multi-path forwarding. In general, security and privacy are considered as essential requirements in ICN. However, existing ICN designs lack built-in privacy protection for content providers (CPs), e.g., any router in an Internet Service Provider in ICN can cache any content, which may result in information leakage. In this paper, we propose Mandatory Content Access Control (MCAC), a distributed information flow control mechanism to enable a content provider to control which network nodes can cache its contents. In MCAC, a CP defines different security labels for different contents, and content routers check these labels to decide if a content object should be cached. To ensure correct enforcement of MCAC, we also propose a design of a trusted architecture by extending existing mainstream router architectures. We evaluate the performance of MCAC in the NS-3 simulator. The simulation results show that enforcing MCAC in routers does not introduce significant overhead in content forwarding.

Pravah: Parameterised Information Flow Control in e-Health

We study the problem of enforcing information flow control (IFC) in eHealth systems. IFC mechanisms allow users to control the release and propagation of sensitive information so that confidential information is not observable to unintended principals while collaborating with other legitimate principals. We describe the methodology for modelling the information flow control requirements in a hospital domain using Pravah, a parameterised lattice-based IFC framework. The key advantage of using the parameterised security class lattice is greater precision in stating policies, enhanced usability and a reduced overhead in creating security tags. We can then use type-checking to statically verify that user programs do not violate stated security policies when accessing or manipulating data records. We discuss the main issues in designing the parameterised security class lattice.

Access Control and Information Flow Control for Web Services Security

With the advancement of web services technology, security has become an increasingly important issue. Various security standards have been developed to secure web services at the transport and message level, but application level has received less attention. The security solutions at the application level focus on access control which cannot alone ensure the confidentiality and integrity of information. The solution proposed in this paper consists on a hybrid model that combines access control (AC) and information flow control (IFC). The AC mechanism uses the concept of roles and attributes to control user access to web services' methods. The IFC mechanism uses labels to control how the roles access to the system's objects and verify the information flows between them to ensure the information confidentiality and integrity. This manuscript describes the model, gives the demonstration of the IFC model safety, presents the modeling and implementation of the model and a case study.

Secure multi-execution of web scripts: Theory and practice

Secure Multi-Execution (SME) is a precise and general information flow control mechanism that was claimed to be a good fit for implementing information flow security in browsers. We validate this claim by developing FlowFox, the first fully functional web browser that implements an information flow control mechanism for web scripts based on the technique of secure multi-execution. We provide evidence for the security of FlowFox by proving non-interference for a formal model of the essence of FlowFox, and by showing how it stops real attacks. We provide evidence of usefulness by showing how FlowFox subsumes many ad-hoc script-containment countermeasures developed over the last years. An experimental evaluation on the Alexa top-500 web sites provides evidence for compatibility, and shows that FlowFox is compatible with the current web, even on sites that make intricate use of JavaScript.The performance and memory cost of FlowFox is substantial (a performance cost of around 20% on macro benchmarks for a simple two-level policy), but not prohibitive. Our prototype implementation shows that information flow enforcement based on secure multi-execution can be implemented in full-scale browsers. It can support powerful, yet compatible policies refining the same-origin-policy in a way that is compatible with existing websites.

Testing noninterference, quickly

Information-flow control mechanisms are difficult to design and labor intensive to prove correct. To reduce the time wasted on proof attempts doomed to fail due to broken definitions, we advocate modern random testing techniques for finding counterexamples during the design process. We show how to use QuickCheck, a property-based random-testing tool, to guide the design of a simple information-flow abstract machine. We find that both sophisticated strategies for generating well-distributed random programs and readily falsifiable formulations of noninterference properties are critically important. We propose several approaches and evaluate their effectiveness on a collection of injected bugs of varying subtlety. We also present an effective technique for shrinking large counterexamples to minimal, easily comprehensible ones. Taken together, our best methods enable us to quickly and automatically generate simple counterexamples for all these bugs.

Arrows for secure information flow

This paper presents an embedded security sublanguage for enforcing information-flow policies in the standard Haskell programming language. The sublanguage provides useful information-flow control mechanisms including dynamic security lattices, run-time code privileges and declassification all without modifying the base language. This design avoids the redundant work of producing new languages, lowers the threshold for adopting security-typed languages, and also provides great flexibility and modularity for using security-policy frameworks. The embedded security sublanguage is designed using a standard combinator interface called arrows. Computations constructed in the sublanguage have static and explicit control-flow components, making it possible to implement information-flow control using static-analysis techniques at run time, while providing strong security guarantees. This paper presents a formal proof that our embedded sublanguage provides noninterference, a concrete Haskell implementation and an example application demonstrating the proposed techniques. 1 1 This paper is an expanded version of an earlier paper that appeared in IEEE CSFW (Li and Zdancewic, 2006 [4]).

Information Flow Certification Using an Intermediate Code Program Representation

This paper describes a compile-time information flow control (IFC) mechanism that certifies secure information flow within the collection of objects accessed by a program. The IFC mechanism is based on the lattice model and certification mechanism of Denning, who proposes the use of the mechanism during the analysis phase of compilation. However, IFC is placed after semantic analysis and before code optimization by ufilizing an intermediate code representation. This reduces the complexity of IFC and allows a degree of language independence. An implentation has been developed for Pascal.