Biblio

Mobile and web applications increasingly leverage service-oriented architectures in which developers integrate third-party services into end user applications. This includes identity management, mapping and navigation, cloud storage, and advertising services, among others. While service reuse reduces development time, it introduces new privacy and security risks due to data repurposing and over-collection as data is shared among multiple parties who lack transparency into thirdparty data practices. To address this challenge, we propose new techniques based on Description Logic (DL) for modeling multiparty data flow requirements and verifying the purpose specification and collection and use limitation principles, which are prominent privacy properties found in international standards and guidelines. We evaluate our techniques in an empirical case study that examines the data practices of the Waze mobile application and three of their service providers: Facebook Login, Amazon Web Services (a cloud storage provider), and Flurry.com (a popular mobile analytics and advertising platform). The study results include detected conflicts and violations of the principles as well as two patterns for balancing privacy and data use flexibility in requirements specifications. Analysis of automation reasoning over the DL models show that reasoning over complex compositions of multi-party systems is feasible within exponential asymptotic timeframes proportional to the policy size, the number of expressed data, and orthogonal to the number of conflicts found.

Most  accounts of information flow security in pro- gramming  languages emphasize non-interference  to characterize security: in a secure program,   changes to high-security  inputs do not alter the values  of low-security  outputs. The definition of non-interference   is incompatible  with declassification, which allows some low-security  outputs to be influenced by high-security inputs. We  propose  an alternative  account of information flow based on an epistemic logic of computational effects. Rather  than view a program  as a function from inputs to outputs, we instead embrace the principle that information flow security is concerned with the effects  a program has  on its execution  environment. These effects are modelled using a substructural  epistemic logic that tracks the flow of knowledge  gained by principals  and communication  channels during execution. Confidentiality   is expressed  by proving  necessary conditions  for a principal to know a sensitive fact at the end of an execution. In the simplest case  the necessary  condition   is  falsehood,   which means  that a principal cannot  know a secret  as  a result of a well-typed execution  of a program. In  the presence  of declassification  a necessary condition  for disclosure   is  the existence  of a proof of authorization in a formal authorization  logic, expressing that sensitive data is disclosed only when explicitly  authorized.  Rather than taken  as the primary result, the classical non-interference property  arises in the proof of adequacy of the epistemic theory of disclosure, ensuring that it accurately models program  behavior. It  is  suggested  that an epistemic  account  of information  flow security is both more natural  and more expressive than classical accounts based only on non-interference.

Build systems contain a lot of configuration knowledge about a software system, such as under which conditions specific files are compiled. Extracting such configuration knowledge is important for many tools analyzing highly-configurable systems, but very challenging due to the complex nature of build systems. We design an approach, based on SYMake, that symbolically evaluates Makefiles and extracts configuration knowledge in terms of file presence conditions and conditional parameters. We implement an initial prototype and demonstrate feasibility on small examples.

Security has consistently been the focus of attention in many highly-configurable software systems. Several vulnerabilities on widely-used systems, such as the Linux kernel and OpenSSL, are reported every day in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). The configurability of these systems enables the rapid generation of customized products, but also creates security challenges in the development and maintenance processes. For instance, interactions caused by configurations may create serious security threats and make generated products more susceptible to attacks [6], but the causes of these problems may be harder to detect because they occur only in specific configurations.

Safety analysis is recognized as a fundamental problem in access control. It has been studied for various access control schemes in the literature. Recent work has proposed an administrative model for Temporal Role-Based Access Control (TRBAC) policies called Administrative TRBAC (ATRBAC). We address ATRBAC-safety. We first identify that the problem is PSPACE-Complete. This is a much tighter identification of the computational complexity of the problem than prior work, which shows only that the problem is decidable. With this result as the basis, we propose an approach that leverages an existing open-source software tool called Mohawk to address ATRBAC-safety. Our approach is to efficiently reduce ATRBAC-safety to ARBAC-safety, and then use Mohawk. We have conducted a thorough empirical assessment. In the course of our assessment, we came up with a "reduction toolkit," which allows us to reduce Mohawk+T input instances to instances that existing tools support. Our results suggest that there are some input classes for which Mohawk+T outperforms existing tools, and others for which existing tools outperform Mohawk+T. The source code for Mohawk+T is available for public download.

The ever increasing expansion of mobile applications into nearly every aspect of modern life, from banking to healthcare systems, is making their security more important than ever. Modern smartphone operating systems (OS) rely substantially on the permission-based security model to enforce restrictions on the operations that each application can perform. In this paper, we perform an analysis of the permission protocol implemented in Android, a popular OS for smartphones. We propose a formal model of the Android permission protocol in Alloy, and describe a fully automatic analysis that identifies potential flaws in the protocol. A study of real-world Android applications corroborates our finding that the flaws in the Android permission protocol can have severe security implications, in some cases allowing the attacker to bypass the permission checks entirely.

Self-adaptive systems overcome many of the limitations of human supervision in complex software-intensive systems by endowing them with the ability to automatically adapt their structure and behavior in the presence of runtime changes. However, adaptation in some classes of systems (e.g., safety-critical) can benefit by receiving information from humans (e.g., acting as sophisticated sensors, decision-makers), or by involving them as system-level effectors to execute adaptations (e.g., when automation is not possible, or as a fallback mechanism). However, human participants are influenced by factors external to the system (e.g., training level, fatigue) that affect the likelihood of success when they perform a task, its duration, or even if they are willing to perform it in the first place. Without careful consideration of these factors, it is unclear how to decide when to involve humans in adaptation, and in which way. In this paper, we investigate how the explicit modeling of human participants can provide a better insight into the trade-offs of involving humans in adaptation. We contribute a formal framework to reason about human involvement in self-adaptation, focusing on the role of human participants as actors (i.e., effectors) during the execution stage of adaptation. The approach consists of: (i) a language to express adaptation models that capture factors affecting human behavior and its interactions with the system, and (ii) a formalization of these adaptation models as stochastic multiplayer games (SMGs) that can be used to analyze human-system-environment interactions. We illustrate our approach in an adaptive industrial middleware used to monitor and manage sensor networks in renewable energy production plants.

Interface-confinement is a common mechanism that secures untrusted code by executing it inside a sandbox. The sandbox limits (confines) the code's interaction with key system resources to a restricted set of interfaces. This practice is seen in web browsers, hypervisors, and other security-critical systems. Motivated by these systems, we present a program logic, called System M, for modeling and proving safety properties of systems that execute adversary-supplied code via interface-confinement. In addition to using computation types to specify effects of computations, System M includes a novel invariant type to specify the properties of interface-confined code. The interpretation of invariant type includes terms whose effects satisfy an invariant. We construct a step-indexed model built over traces and prove the soundness of System M relative to the model. System M is the first program logic that allows proofs of safety for programs that execute adversary-supplied code without forcing the adversarial code to be available for deep static analysis. System M can be used to model and verify protocols as well as system designs. We demonstrate the reasoning principles of System M by verifying the state integrity property of the design of Memoir, a previously proposed trusted computing system.

Insider threats are a well-known problem, and previous studies have shown that it has a huge impact over a wide range of sectors like financial services, governments, critical infrastructure services and the telecommunications sector. Users, while interacting with any software system, leave a trace of what nodes they accessed and in what sequence. We propose to translate these sequences of observed activities into paths on the graph of the underlying software architectural model. We propose a clustering algorithm to find anomalies in the data, which can be combined with contextual information to confirm as an insider threat.

Cilk Plus and OpenMP are parallel language ex-tensions for the C and C++ programming languages. The CPLEX Study Group of the ISO/IEC C Standards Committee is developing a proposal for a parallel programming extension to C that combines ideas from Cilk Plus and OpenMP. We conducted a preliminary comparison of Cilk Plus and OpenMP in a master's level course on security to evaluate the design tradeoffs in the usability and security of these two approaches. The eventual goal is to inform decision making within the committee. We found several usability problems worthy of further investigation based on student performance, including declaring and using reductions, multi-line compiler directives, and the understandability of task assignment to threads.

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) often define protocols --- restrictions on the order of client calls to API methods. API protocols are common and difficult to use, which has generated tremendous research effort in alternative specification, implementation, and verification techniques. However, little is understood about the barriers programmers face when using these APIs, and therefore the research effort may be misdirected.

To understand these barriers better, we perform a two-part qualitative study. First, we study developer forums to identify problems that developers have with protocols. Second, we perform a think-aloud observational study, in which we systematically observe professional programmers struggle with these same problems to get more detail on the nature of their struggles and how they use available resources. In our observations, programmer time was spent primarily on four types of searches of the protocol state space. These observations suggest protocol-targeted tools, languages, and verification techniques will be most effective if they enable programmers to efficiently perform state search.

Foundational models of object-oriented constructs typically model objects as records with a structural type. However, many object-oriented languages are class-based; statically-typed formal models of these languages tend to sacrifice the foundational nature of the record-based models, and in addition cannot express dynamic class loading or creation. In this paper, we explore how to model statically-typed object-oriented languages that support dynamic class creation using foundational constructs of type theory. We start with an extensible tag construct motivated by type theory, and adapt it to support static reasoning about class hierarchy and the tags supported by each object. The result is a model that better explains the relationship between object-oriented and functional programming paradigms, suggests a useful enhancement to functional programming languages, and paves the way for more expressive statically typed object-oriented languages. In that vein, we describe the design and implementation of the Wyvern language, which leverages our theory.

For several decades, inheritance and delegation have been widely adopted for code reuse in object-oriented languages. Though extensive research has explored the expressiveness of these techniques, little is known about how the choice between them affects formal reasoning. In this paper, we explore this question by describing two core languages that are identical except for the use of inheritance and delegation, respectively. We add support for formal reasoning about typestate to both languages, and evaluate the complexity of the formal semantics and compare the example specifications. Our study suggests that our variant of delegation can substantially simplify typestate reasoning, while inheritance makes code more succinct in the case where open recursion is used.