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Formal Analysis of Information Flow in HOL

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Dependable Software Engineering. Theories, Tools, and Applications (SETTA 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10606))

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Abstract

Protecting information has become very important due to the safety-critical nature of many computer-based applications. Information flow analysis plays a very important role in quantifying information-related properties under external attacks. Traditionally, information flow analysis is performed using paper-and-pencil based proofs or computer simulations but due to their inherent nature, these methods are prone to errors and thus cannot guarantee accurate analysis. As an accurate alternative, we propose to conduct the information flow analysis within the sound core of a higher-order-logic theorem prover. For this purpose, some of the most commonly used information flow measures, including Shanon entropy, mutual information, min-entropy, belief min-entropy, have been formalized. In this paper, we use the Shannon entropy and mutual information formalizations to formally verify the Data Processing and Jensen’s inequalities. Moreover, we extend the security model for the case of the partial guess scenario to formalize the gain min-entropy. These formalizations allow us to reason about the information flow of a wide range of systems within a theorem prover. For illustration purposes, we perform a formal comparison between the min-entropy leakage and the gain leakage.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Electrical and Computer Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

    Ghassen Helali, Sofiène Tahar & Osman Hasan

  2. Computer Science and Engineering, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Tsvetan Dunchev

Authors
  1. Ghassen Helali
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  2. Sofiène Tahar
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  3. Osman Hasan
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  4. Tsvetan Dunchev
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ghassen Helali .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Kim Guldstrand Larsen

  2. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

    Oleg Sokolsky

  3. National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China

    Ji Wang

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Helali, G., Tahar, S., Hasan, O., Dunchev, T. (2017). Formal Analysis of Information Flow in HOL. In: Larsen, K., Sokolsky, O., Wang, J. (eds) Dependable Software Engineering. Theories, Tools, and Applications. SETTA 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10606. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69483-2_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69483-2_17

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-69483-2

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