Team for Research in
Ubiquitous Secure Technology

Citation
Stephen Chong, Andrew C. Myers. "Decentralized Robustness". Proceedings of the 19th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop, 242-253, July, 2006.

Abstract
Robustness links confidentiality and integrity properties of a computing system and has been identified as a useful property for characterizing and enforcing security. Previous characterizations of robustness have been with respect to a single idealized attacker; this paper shows how to define robustness for systems with mutual distrust. Further, we demonstrate that the decentralized label model (DLM) can be extended to support fine-grained reasoning about robustness in such systems. The DLM is a natural choice for capturing robustness requirements because decentralized labels are explicitly expressed in terms of principals that can be used to characterize the power of attackers across both the confidentiality and integrity axes. New rules are proposed for statically checking robustness and qualified robustness using an extended DLM; the resulting type system is shown to soundly enforce robustness. Finally, sound approximations are developed for checking programs with bounded but unknown label parameters, which is useful for security-typed languages. In sum, the paper shows how to use robustness to gain assurance about secure information flow and information release in systems with complex security requirements.

Electronic downloads

• http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/papers/robdlm.pdf

• HTML

  Stephen Chong, Andrew C. Myers. <a
  href="http://www.truststc.org/pubs/455.html"
  >Decentralized Robustness</a>, Proceedings of the
  19th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop, 242-253,
  July, 2006.

• Plain text

  Stephen Chong, Andrew C. Myers. "Decentralized
  Robustness". Proceedings of the 19th IEEE Computer
  Security Foundations Workshop, 242-253, July, 2006.

• BibTeX

  @inproceedings{ChongMyers06_DecentralizedRobustness,
      author = {Stephen Chong and Andrew C. Myers},
      title = {Decentralized Robustness},
      booktitle = {Proceedings of the 19th IEEE Computer Security
                Foundations Workshop},
      pages = {242-253},
      month = {July},
      year = {2006},
      abstract = {Robustness links confidentiality and integrity
                properties of a computing system and has been
                identified as a useful property for characterizing
                and enforcing security. Previous characterizations
                of robustness have been with respect to a single
                idealized attacker; this paper shows how to define
                robustness for systems with mutual distrust.
                Further, we demonstrate that the decentralized
                label model (DLM) can be extended to support
                fine-grained reasoning about robustness in such
                systems. The DLM is a natural choice for capturing
                robustness requirements because decentralized
                labels are explicitly expressed in terms of
                principals that can be used to characterize the
                power of attackers across both the confidentiality
                and integrity axes. New rules are proposed for
                statically checking robustness and qualified
                robustness using an extended DLM; the resulting
                type system is shown to soundly enforce
                robustness. Finally, sound approximations are
                developed for checking programs with bounded but
                unknown label parameters, which is useful for
                security-typed languages. In sum, the paper shows
                how to use robustness to gain assurance about
                secure information flow and information release in
                systems with complex security requirements.},
      URL = {http://www.truststc.org/pubs/455.html}
  }
  

Posted by Andrew C. Myers, Ph.D. on 22 Aug 2008.
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