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Abstract : |
Abstract ? Current standard security practices do not provide substantial assurance that the end-to-end behavior of a computing system satisfies important security policies such as confidentiality. An end-to-end confidentiality policy might assert that secret input data cannot be inferred by an attacker through the attacker?s observations of system output; this policy regulates information flow. Conventional security mechanisms such as access control and encryption do not directly address the enforcement of information-flow policies. Recently, a promising new approach has been developed: the use of programming-language techniques for specifying and enforcing information-flow policies. In this article we survey the past three decades of research on information-flow security, particularly focusing on work that uses static program analysis to enforce information-flow policies. We give a structured view of recent work in the area and identify some important open challenges. Index Terms ? Computer security, confidentiality, information flow, noninterference, security-type systems, covert channels, security policies, concurrency. I., |
