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Downgrading policies and relaxed noninterference

Published: 12 January 2005 Publication History

Abstract

In traditional information-flow type systems, the security policy is often formalized as noninterference properties. However, noninterference alone is too strong to express security properties useful in practice. If we allow downgrading in such systems, it is challenging to formalize the security policy as an extensional property of the system.This paper presents a generalized framework of downgrading policies. Such policies can be specified in a simple and tractable language and can be statically enforced by mechanisms such as type systems. The security guarantee is then formalized as a concise extensional property using program equivalences. This relaxed noninterference generalizes traditional pure noninterference and precisely characterizes the information released due to downgrading.

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 40, Issue 1
Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
January 2005
391 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1047659
Issue’s Table of Contents
  • cover image ACM Conferences
    POPL '05: Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
    January 2005
    402 pages
    ISBN:158113830X
    DOI:10.1145/1040305
    • General Chair:
    • Jens Palsberg,
    • Program Chair:
    • Martín Abadi
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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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 12 January 2005
Published in SIGPLAN Volume 40, Issue 1

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Author Tags

  1. downgrading policies
  2. information flow
  3. language-based security
  4. program equivalence
  5. relaxed noninterference

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  • (2020)Type-Based Declassification for FreeFormal Methods and Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-030-63406-3_11(181-197)Online publication date: 19-Dec-2020
  • (2019)Existential Types for Relaxed NoninterferenceProgramming Languages and Systems10.1007/978-3-030-34175-6_5(73-92)Online publication date: 18-Nov-2019
  • (2019)Output-Sensitive Information Flow AnalysisFormal Techniques for Distributed Objects, Components, and Systems10.1007/978-3-030-21759-4_6(93-110)Online publication date: 29-May-2019
  • (2016)Information flow analysis for a dynamically typed language with staged metaprogrammingJournal of Computer Security10.3233/JCS-16055724:5(541-582)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2016
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