Language-based information-flow security

TLDR

Current standard security practices do not provide substantial assurance that a computing system satisfies end‑to‑end confidentiality policies, which regulate information flow. The paper surveys three decades of research on information‑flow security, aiming to assess how static program analysis has been used to enforce confidentiality policies. The survey focuses on static program analysis techniques as the primary mechanism for enforcing information‑flow policies. The authors present a structured overview of the field and highlight several open challenges.

Abstract

Current standard security practices do not provide substantial assurance that the end-to-end behavior of a computing system satisfies important security policies such as confidentiality. An end-to-end confidentiality policy might assert that secret input data cannot be inferred by an attacker through the attacker's observations of system output; this policy regulates information flow. Conventional security mechanisms such as access control and encryption do not directly address the enforcement of information-flow policies. Previously, a promising new approach has been developed: the use of programming-language techniques for specifying and enforcing information-flow policies. In this paper, we survey the past three decades of research on information-flow security, particularly focusing on work that uses static program analysis to enforce information-flow policies. We give a structured view of work in the area and identify some important open challenges.