Information Flow Control for Concurrent Covert Termination and Timing Channels
Speaker: Alejandro Russo , Chalmers University of Technology
Date: Thursday, June 28 2012
Time: 3:00PM to 4:30PM
Refreshments: 2:45PM
Location: 8th floor reading room, 32-G882
Host: Professor Arvind, CSG-CSAIL-MIT
Contact: Sally O. Lee, 3-6837, sally@csail.mit.edu
When termination of a program is observable by an adversary, confidential information may be leaked by terminating accordingly.
While this termination covert channel has limited bandwidth for sequential programs, it is a more dangerous source of information
leakage in concurrent settings. We address concurrent termination and timing channels by presenting a dynamic information-flow
control system that mitigates and eliminates these channels while allowing termination and timing to depend on secret values.
Intuitively, we leverage concurrency by placing such potentially sensitive actions in separate threads. While termination and timing of
these threads may expose secret values, our system requires any thread observing these properties to raise its information-flow label
accordingly, preventing leaks to lower-labeled contexts. We implement this approach in a Haskell library and demonstrate its applicability
by building a web server that uses information-flow control to restrict untrusted web applications.
This talk is based on a joint-work-in-progress with Deian Stefan, Pablo Buiras, Amit Levy, John C. Mitchell, and David Mazières
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