Declassification with explicit reference points

Abstract

Noninterference requires that public outputs of a program must be completely independent from secrets. While this ensures that secrets cannot be leaked, it is too restrictive for many applications. For instance, the output of a knowledge-based authentication mechanism needs to reveal whether an input matches the secret password. The research problem is to allow such exceptions without giving up too much. Though a number of solutions has been developed, the problem is not yet satisfactorily solved. In this article, we propose a framework to control what information is declassified. Our contributions include a policy language, a semantic characterization of information flow security, and a sound security type system. The main technical novelty is the explicit treatment of so called reference points, which allows us to offer substantially more flexible control of what is released than in existing approaches. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.