Discretionary information flow control for interaction-oriented specifications

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to specify and check discretionary information flow properties of concurrent systems. The approach is inspired by the success of the interaction-oriented paradigm to concurrent systems (cf. choreographies, behavioural types, protocols,…) in providing behavioural guarantees of global properties such as deadlock-absence. We show how some information flow properties are easier to formalise and check on a global interaction-oriented description of a concurrent system rather than on a local process-oriented description of the components of the system. We use a simple choreography description language adapted from the literature of choreographies and session types. We provide a generic method to instrument the semantics with information flow annotations. Policies are used to specify the admissible flows of information. The main contribution of the paper is a sound type system for statically checking if a system specification ensures an information flow policy. The approach is illustrated with two archetypal examples of distributed and parallel computing systems: a protocol for an identity-secured data providing service and a parallel MapReduce computation.