A Formulation of the Potential for Communication Condition using C2KA
This work addresses the challenge of safeguarding systems from covert channels for security practitioners, but it appears incremental as it extends existing approaches by considering external stimuli in addition to shared environments.
The paper tackles the problem of identifying covert channels in systems of communicating agents by formulating the potential for communication condition, a necessary condition for covert channel existence, and discusses its preservation after agent modifications, using the Communicating Concurrent Kleene Algebra (C2KA) framework.
An integral part of safeguarding systems of communicating agents from covert channel communication is having the ability to identify when a covert channel may exist in a given system and which agents are more prone to covert channels than others. In this paper, we propose a formulation of one of the necessary conditions for the existence of covert channels: the potential for communication condition. Then, we discuss when the potential for communication is preserved after the modification of system agents in a potential communication path. Our approach is based on the mathematical framework of Communicating Concurrent Kleene Algebra (C2KA). While existing approaches only consider the potential for communication via shared environments, the approach proposed in this paper also considers the potential for communication via external stimuli.