Departmental Papers (CIS)
Date of this Version
June 2005
Document Type
Conference Paper
Recommended Citation
Peng Li and Stephan A. Zdancewic, "Practical Information-flow Control in Web-based Information Systems", . June 2005.
Abstract
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.
Date Posted: 25 February 2006
Comments
Copyright 2005 IEEE. Reprinted from Proceedings of the 18th IEEE Workshop on Computer Security Foundations 2005 (CSFW-18 2005), pages 2-15.
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