An information flow verifier for small embedded systems

Abstract

Insecurity arising from illegal information flow represents a real threat in small computing environments allowing code sharing, dynamic class loading and overloading. We introduce a verifier able to certify at loading time Java applications already typed with signatures describing possible information flows. The verifier is implemented as a class loader and can be used on any Java Virtual Machine. The experimental results provided here support our approach and show that the verifier can be successfully embedded. As far as we know, this is the first information flow analysis adapted to open embedded systems. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2007.