Proving concurrent noninterference

Abstract

We perform a formal analysis of compositionality techniques for proving possibilistic noninterference for a while language with parallel composition. We develop a uniform framework where we express a wide range of noninterference variants from the literature and compare them w.r.t. their contracts: the strength of the security properties they ensure weighed against the harshness of the syntactic conditions they enforce. This results in a simple implementable algorithm for proving that a program has a specific noninterference property, using only compositionality, which captures uniformly several security type-system results from the literature and suggests a further improved type system. All formalism and theorems have been mechanically verified in Isabelle/HOL. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.