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From Dynamic to Static and Back: Riding the Roller Coaster of Information-Flow Control Research

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Perspectives of Systems Informatics (PSI 2009)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 5947))

Abstract

Historically, dynamic techniques are the pioneers of the area of information flow in the 70’s. In their seminal work, Denning and Denning suggest a static alternative for information-flow analysis. Following this work, the 90’s see the domination of static techniques for information flow. The common wisdom appears to be that dynamic approaches are not a good match for security since monitoring a single path misses public side effects that could have happened in other paths. Dynamic techniques for information flow are on the rise again, driven by the need for permissiveness in today’s dynamic applications. But they still involve nontrivial static checks for leaks related to control flow.

This paper demonstrates that it is possible for a purely dynamic enforcement to be as secure as Denning-style static information-flow analysis, despite the common wisdom. We do have the trade-off that static techniques have benefits of reducing runtime overhead, and dynamic techniques have the benefits of permissiveness (this, for example, is of particular importance in dynamic applications, where freshly generated code is evaluated). But on the security side, we show for a simple imperative language that both Denning-style analysis and dynamic enforcement have the same assurance: termination-insensitive noninterference.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, 412 96, Göteborg, Sweden

    Andrei Sabelfeld & Alejandro Russo

Authors
  1. Andrei Sabelfeld
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  2. Alejandro Russo
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. (1941-2009), The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel New York University, NY, USA

    Amir Pnueli

  2. Siberian Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences, A.P. Ershov Institute of Informatics Systems, 6, Acad. Lavrentiev pr., 630090, Novosibirsk, Russia

    Irina Virbitskaite

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, M13 9PL, Manchester, UK

    Andrei Voronkov

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Sabelfeld, A., Russo, A. (2010). From Dynamic to Static and Back: Riding the Roller Coaster of Information-Flow Control Research. In: Pnueli, A., Virbitskaite, I., Voronkov, A. (eds) Perspectives of Systems Informatics. PSI 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5947. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11486-1_30

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11486-1_30

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-11485-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-11486-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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