| Title | Backwards-directed information flow analysis for concurrent programs |
| Publication Type | Conference Paper |
| Year of Publication | 2021 |
| Authors | Winter, Kirsten, Coughlin, Nicholas, Smith, Graeme |
| Conference Name | 2021 IEEE 34th Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF) |
| Keywords | Analytical models, Automation, Cognition, composability, Concurrency, Concurrent computing, Hardware, information-flow-security, Metrics, Out of order, Programming, pubcrawl, rely-guarantee-reasoning, resilience, Resiliency, security, weakest-precondition |
| Abstract | A number of approaches have been developed for analysing information flow in concurrent programs in a compositional manner, i.e., in terms of one thread at a time. Early approaches modelled the behaviour of a given thread's environment using simple read and write permissions on variables, or by associating specific behaviour with whether or not locks are held. Recent approaches allow more general representations of environmental behaviour, increasing applicability. This, however, comes at a cost. These approaches analyse the code in a forwards direction, from the start of the program to the end, constructing the program's entire state after each instruction. This process needs to take into account the environmental influence on all shared variables of the program. When environmental influence is modelled in a general way, this leads to increased complexity, hindering automation of the analysis. In this paper, we present a compositional information flow analysis for concurrent systems which is the first to support a general representation of environmental behaviour and be automated within a theorem prover. Our approach analyses the code in a backwards direction, from the end of the program to the start. Rather than constructing the entire state at each instruction, it generates only the security-related proof obligations. These are, in general, much simpler, referring to only a fraction of the program's shared variables and thus reducing the complexity introduced by environmental behaviour. For increased applicability, our approach analyses value-dependent information flow, where the security classification of a variable may depend on the current state. The resulting logic has been proved sound within the theorem prover Isabelle/HOL. |
| DOI | 10.1109/CSF51468.2021.00017 |
| Citation Key | winter_backwards-directed_2021 |
Backwards-directed information flow analysis for concurrent programs