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Faceted Dynamic Information Flow via Control and Data Monads

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Principles of Security and Trust (POST 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 9635))

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Abstract

An application that fails to ensure information flow security may leak sensitive data such as passwords, credit card numbers, or medical records. News stories of such failures abound. Austin and Flanagan [2] introduce faceted values – values that present different behavior according to the privilege of the observer – as a dynamic approach to enforce information flow policies for an untyped, imperative \(\lambda \)-calculus.

We implement faceted values as a Haskell library, elucidating their relationship to types and monadic imperative programming. In contrast to previous work, our approach does not require modification to the language runtime. In addition to pure faceted values, our library supports faceted mutable reference cells and secure facet-aware socket-like communication. This library guarantees information flow security, independent of any vulnerabilities or bugs in application code. The library uses a control monad in the traditional way for encapsulating effects, but it also uniquely uses a second data monad to structure faceted values. To illustrate a non-trivial use of the library, we present a bi-monadic interpreter for a small language that illustrates the interplay of the control and data monads.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We refer to sensitive values as “private” and non-sensitive values as “public”, as confidentiality is generally given more attention in the literature on information flow analysis. However, the same mechanism can also enforce integrity properties, such as that trusted outputs are not influenced by untrusted inputs.

  2. 2.

    Alternatively, a faceted value can be interpreted as a function mapping sets of labels to values, and the syntax above as merely a compact representation.

  3. 3.

    That is, authorized to see data marked as sensitive to principal k.

  4. 4.

    Faceted values are closely related to the value pairs used by [22]; while intended as a proof technique rather than a dynamic enforcement mechanism, the construct is essentially identical.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under grants CCF-1337278 and CCF-1421016.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, USA

    Thomas Schmitz, Dustin Rhodes, Kenneth Knowles & Cormac Flanagan

  2. San José State University, San Jose, USA

    Thomas H. Austin

Authors
  1. Thomas Schmitz
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  2. Dustin Rhodes
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  3. Thomas H. Austin
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  4. Kenneth Knowles
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  5. Cormac Flanagan
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Thomas Schmitz .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Frank Piessens

  2. King’s College London, London, UK

    Luca Viganò

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Schmitz, T., Rhodes, D., Austin, T.H., Knowles, K., Flanagan, C. (2016). Faceted Dynamic Information Flow via Control and Data Monads. In: Piessens, F., Viganò, L. (eds) Principles of Security and Trust. POST 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9635. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-49635-0_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-49635-0_1

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