Thursday, February 28, 2008
4:15 pm
B17 Upson Hall

Computer Science
Colloquium
Spring 2008

Jeannette M. Wing

President's Professor, CS Department, Carnegie Mellon University
Assistant Director, Computer and Information Science and Engineering
Directorate, National Science Foundation
 

 

Confidentiality Policy Extraction

Information about a high-level user, e.g., a patient, should be kept confidential from low-level users, e.g., clerks in a medical office. How can we ensure that a program preserves confidentiality? To address this question, first, we propose a confidentiality requirement that is strictly weaker than Goguen-Meseguer's noninterference property, but reflects many realistic scenarios. Our “incident-insensitive” noninterference property allows low-level users to learn that the incident of accessing a high-level resource has occurred, but not the value of the resource. We extend this requirement to depend on dynamic information, for example, input from users as a system runs. Lastly, we present a syntactic approach to extract from program source code the dynamic confidentiality policy the given program obeys.

This work is joint with Michael Tschantz.