Calculational Design of Information Flow Monitors (extended version)
This addresses the problem of balancing security, performance, and practicality in information flow monitoring for developers and security engineers, though it appears incremental as it builds on standard abstract interpretation methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of designing sound, efficient, and precise fine-grained information flow monitors for security and privacy in applications like web apps, presenting a systematic technique based on abstract interpretation to achieve correctness by construction.
Fine grained information flow monitoring can in principle address a wide range of security and privacy goals, for example in web applications. But it is very difficult to achieve sound monitoring with acceptable runtime cost and sufficient precision to avoid impractical restrictions on programs and policies. We present a systematic technique for design of monitors that are correct by construction. It encompasses policies with downgrading. The technique is based on abstract interpretation which is a standard basis for static analysis of programs. This should enable integration of a wide range of analysis techniques, enabling more sophisticated engineering of monitors to address the challenges of precision and scaling to widely used programming languages.