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Existential Types for Relaxed Noninterference

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Programming Languages and Systems (APLAS 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 11893))

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Abstract

Information-flow security type systems ensure confidentiality by enforcing noninterference: a program cannot leak private data to public channels. However, in practice, programs need to selectively declassify information about private data. Several approaches have provided a notion of relaxed noninterference supporting selective and expressive declassification while retaining a formal security property. The labels-as-functions approach provides relaxed noninterference by means of declassification policies expressed as functions. The labels-as-types approach expresses declassification policies using type abstraction and faceted types, a pair of types representing the secret and public facets of values. The original proposal of labels-as-types is formulated in an object-oriented setting where type abstraction is realized by subtyping. The object-oriented approach however suffers from limitations due to its receiver-centric paradigm.

In this work, we consider an alternative approach to labels-as-types, applicable in non-object-oriented languages, which allows us to express advanced declassification policies, such as extrinsic policies, based on a different form of type abstraction: existential types. An existential type exposes abstract types and operations on these; we leverage this abstraction mechanism to express secrets that can be declassified using the provided operations. We formalize the approach in a core functional calculus with existential types, define existential relaxed noninterference, and prove that well-typed programs satisfy this form of type-based relaxed noninterference.

This work is partially funded by CONICYT FONDECYT Regular Projects 1150017 and 1190058. Raimil Cruz is partially funded by CONICYT-PCHA/Doctorado Nacional/2014-63140148.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Li and Zdancewic [9] rule out recursive declassification because otherwise the subtyping relation induced by security labels (sets of functions) would be undecidable.

  2. 2.

    To account for \(n > 2\) observation levels, faceted types can be extended to have n facets.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. PLEIAD Lab, Computer Science Department (DCC), University of Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Raimil Cruz & Éric Tanter

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  1. Raimil Cruz
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  2. Éric Tanter
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Correspondence to Raimil Cruz .

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  1. University of Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Anthony Widjaja Lin

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Cruz, R., Tanter, É. (2019). Existential Types for Relaxed Noninterference. In: Lin, A. (eds) Programming Languages and Systems. APLAS 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11893. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34175-6_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34175-6_5

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-34175-6

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