Practical Information-flow Control in Web-based Information Systems

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This paper presents a practical application of language-based information-flow control, namely, a domain-specific web scripting language designed for interfacing with databases. The primary goal is to provide strong enforcement of confidentiality and integrity policies: confidential data can be released only in permitted ways and trustworthy data must result from expected computations or conform to expected patterns. Such security policies are specified in the database layer and statically enforced for the rest of the system in an end-to-end fashion. In contrast with existing web-scripting languages, which provide only ad hoc mechanisms for information security, the scripting language described here uses principles based on the well-studied techniques in information-flow type systems. However, because web scripts often need to downgrade confidential data and manipulated untrusted user input, they require practical and convenient ways of downgrading secure data. To achieve this goal, the language allows safe downgrading according to downgrading policies specified by the programmer. This novel, pattern-based approach provides a practical instance of recent work on delimited release and relaxed noninterference and extends that work by accounting for integrity policies.

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2005-06-20
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2023-05-16T23:22:41.000
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Copyright 2005 IEEE. Reprinted from Proceedings of the 18th IEEE Workshop on Computer Security Foundations 2005 (CSFW-18 2005), pages 2-15. This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Such permission of the IEEE does not in any way imply IEEE endorsement of any of the University of Pennsylvania's products or services. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to pubs-permissions@ieee.org. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.
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