Deriving an information flow checker and certifying compiler for Java

Abstract

Language-based security provides a means to enforce endto-end confidentiality and integrity policies in mobile code scenarios, and is increasingly being contemplated by the smartcard and mobile phone industry as a solution to enforce information flow and resource control policies.Two threads of work have emerged in research on languagebased security: work that focuses on enforcing security policies for source code, which is tailored towards developers that want to increase confidence in their applications, and work that focuses on efficiently verifying similar policies for bytecode, which is tailored to code consumers that want to protect themselves against hostile applications. These lines of work serve different purposes-and thus have been developed independently-but connecting them is a key step towards the deployment of language-based security in practical applications.This paper introduces a systematic technique to connect source code and bytecode security type systems. The technique is applied to an information flow type system for a fragment of Java with exceptions, thus confronting challenges in both control and data flow tracking.

Securing the Future — An Information Flow Analysis of a Distributed OO Language

“…In that area, a lot of attention has also been devoted to the analysis of low-level OO-languages, e.g. Java bytecode [4,5].…”

Securing Class Initialization

“…Barthe and Rezk [BR05] consider type-based enforcement of secure information flow in Java bytecode-like languages. Barthe et al [BRN06] extend this work to derive an information-flow certifying compiler for a Java-like language.…”

“…Barthe et al [BPR07] extend this approach to multiple types of catchable exceptions. Connecting this with security-type preserving compilation, Barthe et al [BRN06] show how to securely compile a source language with a single type of catchable exceptions to the low-level language of Barthe and Rezk [BR05].…”

MOBIUS: Mobility, Ubiquity, Security

“…JFlow offers a practical tool for developing secure applications but does not address mobile code security as envisioned in MOBIUS since it applies to source code. In order to show that applications written in (a variant of) JFlow can be deployed in a mobile code architecture that delivers the promises of JFlow in terms of confidentiality, [7] proves that a standard (non-optimizing) Java compiler translates programs that are typable in a type system inspired from [5], but extended to exceptions, into programs that are typable in our system.…”