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Uncovering Information Flow Policy Violations in C Programs (Extended Abstract)

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Computer Security – ESORICS 2019 (ESORICS 2019)

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Abstract

Programmers of cryptographic applications written in C need to avoid common mistakes such as sending private data over public channels or improperly ordering protocol steps. These secrecy, integrity, and sequencing policies can be cumbersome to check with existing general-purpose tools. We have developed a novel means of specifying and uncovering violations of these policies that allows for a much lighter-weight approach than previous tools. We embed the policy annotations in C’s type system via a source-to-source translation and leverage existing C compilers to check for policy violations, achieving high performance and scalability. We show through case studies of recent cryptographic libraries and applications that our work is able to express detailed policies for large bodies of C code and can find subtle policy violations. We show formal connections between the policy annotations and an information flow type system and prove a noninterference guarantee of our design.

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Acknowledgement

This work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation via grants CNS1704542 and CNS1464113, and by the National Institutes of Health via award 1U01EB023685-01.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA

    Darion Cassel & Limin Jia

  2. Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, 47405, USA

    Yan Huang

Authors
  1. Darion Cassel
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  2. Yan Huang
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  3. Limin Jia
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Correspondence to Darion Cassel .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. NEC Corporation, Kawasaki, Japan

    Kazue Sako

  2. University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

    Steve Schneider

  3. University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg

    Peter Y. A. Ryan

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Cassel, D., Huang, Y., Jia, L. (2019). Uncovering Information Flow Policy Violations in C Programs (Extended Abstract). In: Sako, K., Schneider, S., Ryan, P. (eds) Computer Security – ESORICS 2019. ESORICS 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11736. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29962-0_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29962-0_2

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-29962-0

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