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International Colloquium on Theoretical Aspects of Computing

ICTAC 2005: Theoretical Aspects of Computing – ICTAC 2005 pp 351–365Cite as

Information Flow Is Linear Refinement of Constancy

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 3722))

Abstract

Detecting information flows inside a program is useful to check non-interference of program variables, an important aspect of software security. Information flows have been computed in the past by using abstract interpretation over an abstract domain IF which expresses sets of flows. In this paper we reconstruct IF as the linear refinement C → C of a basic domain C expressing constancy of program variables. This is important since we also show that C → C, and hence IF, is closed w.r.t. linear refinement, and is hence optimal and condensing. Then a compositional, input-independent static analysis over IF has the same precision of a non-compositional, input-driven analysis. Moreover, we show that C → C has a natural representation in terms of Boolean formulas, efficiently implementable through binary decision diagrams.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Verona, Italy

    Fausto Spoto

Authors
  1. Fausto Spoto
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Technology, Vietnam National University, Hanoi, Vietnam

    Dang Van Hung

  2. Institute of Computer Science, LMU Munich, Munich, Germany

    Martin Wirsing

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Spoto, F. (2005). Information Flow Is Linear Refinement of Constancy. In: Van Hung, D., Wirsing, M. (eds) Theoretical Aspects of Computing – ICTAC 2005. ICTAC 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3722. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11560647_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11560647_23

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-29107-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32072-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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