Abstract
Non-interference is one of the foundational notions of security stretching back to Goguen and Meseguer [3]. Roughly, a set of activities C is non-interfering with a set D if any possible behavior at D is compatible with anything that could have occurred at C. One also speaks of “no information flow” from C to D in this case. Many hands further developed the idea and its variants (e.g. [12, 15]), which also flourished within the process calculus context [1, 2, 6, 13]. A.W. Roscoe contributed a characteristically distinctive idea to this discussion, in collaboration with J. Woodcock and L. Wulf. The idea was that a system is secure for flow from C to D when, after hiding behaviors at the source C, the destination D experiences the system as deterministic [8, 11]. In the CSP tradition, a process is deterministic if, after engaging in a sequence t of events, it can refuse an event a, then it always refuses the event a after engaging in t [9].
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Notes
- 1.
By an interface, we just mean a set of channels, often but not necessarily near each other in the graph.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Paul D. Rowe and John D. Ramsdell, with whom I discussed many of these ideas. In particular, John Ramsdell worked out the successive frame versions summarized in the figures.
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Guttman, J.D. (2017). Information Flow, Distributed Systems, and Refinement, by Example. In: Gibson-Robinson, T., Hopcroft, P., Lazić, R. (eds) Concurrency, Security, and Puzzles. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10160. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51046-0_5
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