Information flow control for standard OS abstractions

ion Flow Control for Standard OS Abstractions Maxwell Krohn Alexander Yip Micah Brodsky Natan Cliffer M. Frans Kaashoek Eddie Kohler† Robert Morris MIT CSAIL †UCLA http://flume.csail.mit.edu/ Decentralized Information Flow Control (DIFC) [24] is an approach to security that allows application writers to control how data flows between the pieces of an application and the outside world. As applied to privacy, DIFC allows untrusted software to compute with private data while trusted security code controls the release of that data. As applied to integrity, DIFC allows trusted code to protect untrusted software from unexpected malicious inputs. In either case, only bugs in the trusted code, which tends to be small and isolated, can lead to security violations. We present Flume, a new DIFC model and system that applies at the granularity of operating system processes and standard OS abstractions (e.g., pipes and file descriptors). Flume eases DIFC’s use in existing applications and...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: SOSP
• Authors: Maxwell N. Krohn, Alexander Yip, Micah Z. Brodsky, Natan Cliffer, M. Frans Kaashoek, Eddie Kohler, Robert Morris
• Keywords: Flume Eases Difc, Flume Version, Operating System, SOSP 2007, Standard Os Abstractions