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Confidentiality for Multithreaded Programs via Bisimulation

  • Conference paper
Perspectives of System Informatics (PSI 2003)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2890))

Abstract

Bisimulation has been a popular foundation for characterizing the confidentiality properties of concurrent programs. However, because a variety of bisimulation definitions are available in the literature, it is often difficult to pin down the “right” definition for modeling a particular attacker. Focusing on timing- and probability-sensitive confidentiality for shared-memory multithreaded programs, we clarify the relation between different kinds of bisimulation by proving inclusion results. As a consequence, we derive the relationship between scheduler-specific, scheduler-independent, and strong confidentiality definitions. A key result justifying strong confidentiality is that it is the most accurate (largest) compositional indistinguishability-based confidentiality property that implies scheduler-independent confidentiality.

This research was supported by the Department of the Navy, Office of Naval Research, ONR Grant N00014-01-1-0968. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations contained in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Office of Naval Research.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14853, USA

    Andrei Sabelfeld

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  1. Andrei Sabelfeld
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Technische Universität München, Germany

    Manfred Broy

  2. A.P. Ershov Institute of Informatics Systems, Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences, 630090, Novosibirsk, Russia

    Alexandre V. Zamulin

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Sabelfeld, A. (2004). Confidentiality for Multithreaded Programs via Bisimulation. In: Broy, M., Zamulin, A.V. (eds) Perspectives of System Informatics. PSI 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2890. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39866-0_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39866-0_27

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-20813-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-39866-0

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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