FLOC 2018: FEDERATED LOGIC CONFERENCE 2018
A Permission-Dependent Type System for Secure Information Flow Analysis

Authors: Hongxu Chen, Alwen Tiu, Zhiwu Xu and Yang Liu

Paper Information

Title:A Permission-Dependent Type System for Secure Information Flow Analysis
Authors:Hongxu Chen, Alwen Tiu, Zhiwu Xu and Yang Liu
Proceedings:CSF CSF Proceedings
Editors: Stephen Chong, Stephanie Delaune and Deepak Garg
Keywords:type system, permission model, language based security, information flow
Abstract:

ABSTRACT. We introduce a novel type system for enforcing secure information flow in an imperative language. Our work is motivated by the problem of statically checking potential information leakage in Android applications. To this end, we design a lightweight type system featuring Android permission model, where the permissions are statically assigned to applications and are used to enforce access control in the applications. We take inspiration from a type system by Banerjee and Naumann (BN) to allow security types to be dependent on the permissions of the applications. A novel feature of our type system is a typing rule for conditional branching induced by permission testing, which introduces a merging operator on security types, allowing more precise security policies to be enforced. The soundness of our type system is proved with respect to non-interference. In addition, a type inference algorithm is presented for the underlying security type system, by reducing the inference problem to a constraint solving problem in the lattice of security types.

Pages:15
Talk:Jul 11 09:00 (Session 60B: Information flow)
Paper: