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Using Architecture to Reason about Information Security

Published: 09 December 2015 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    We demonstrate, by a number of examples, that information flow security properties can be proved from abstract architectural descriptions, which describe only the causal structure of a system and local properties of trusted components. We specify these architectural descriptions of systems by generalizing intransitive noninterference policies to admit the ability to filter information passed between communicating domains. A notion of refinement of such system architectures is developed that supports top-down development of architectural specifications and proofs by abstraction of information security properties. We also show that, in a concrete setting where the causal structure is enforced by access control, a static check of the access control setting plus local verification of the trusted components is sufficient to prove that a generalized intransitive noninterference policy is satisfied.

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    • (2020)Nontransitive Security Types for Coarse-grained Information Flow Control2020 IEEE 33rd Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF)10.1109/CSF49147.2020.00022(199-213)Online publication date: Jul-2020
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        Published In

        cover image ACM Transactions on Information and System Security
        ACM Transactions on Information and System Security  Volume 18, Issue 2
        December 2015
        118 pages
        ISSN:1094-9224
        EISSN:1557-7406
        DOI:10.1145/2807425
        Issue’s Table of Contents
        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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        Publication History

        Published: 09 December 2015
        Accepted: 01 September 2015
        Revised: 01 September 2015
        Received: 01 October 2014
        Published in TISSEC Volume 18, Issue 2

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        Author Tags

        1. Information flow security
        2. epistemic logic
        3. intransitive noninterference
        4. system architecture

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        • Australian Research Council Discovery
        • National Science Foundation
        • Air Force Office of Scientific Research

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        • (2020)Nontransitive Security Types for Coarse-grained Information Flow Control2020 IEEE 33rd Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF)10.1109/CSF49147.2020.00022(199-213)Online publication date: Jul-2020
        • (2019)Component-Based Refinement and Verification of Information-Flow Security Policies for Cyber-Physical Microservice Architectures2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA)10.1109/ICSA.2019.00015(61-70)Online publication date: Mar-2019
        • (2018)CoSMedJournal of Automated Reasoning10.1007/s10817-017-9443-361:1-4(113-139)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2018
        • (2018)Towards Preserving Information Flow Security on Architectural Composition of Cyber-Physical SystemsSoftware Architecture10.1007/978-3-030-00761-4_10(147-155)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2018
        • (2017)An Approach for Identifying and Analyzing Implicit Interactions in Distributed SystemsIEEE Transactions on Reliability10.1109/TR.2017.266516466:2(529-546)Online publication date: Jul-2017
        • (2017)CoSMeDis: A Distributed Social Media Platform with Formally Verified Confidentiality Guarantees2017 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP.2017.24(729-748)Online publication date: May-2017

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