Information flow control and applications - Bridging a gap

Abstract

The development of formal security models is a difficult, time consuming, and expensive task. This development burden can be consid-erably reduced by using generic security models. In a security model, confidentiality as well as integrity requirements can be expressed by restrictions on the information flow. Generic models for controling information flow in distributed systems have been thoroughly investigated. Nevertheless, the known approaches cannot cope with common features of secure distributed systems like channel control, information filters, or explicit downgrading. This limitation caused a major gap which has prevented the migration of a large body of research into practice. To bridge this gap is the main goal of this article. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2001.