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Labelled mobile ambients model for information flow security in distributed systems

Published: 08 September 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Lattice model of secure information flow (referred as LIFS) is the foundation for building secure systems. In this paper, we capture the lattice model of security for mobility in a distributed setup using the formalism of Mobile Ambient calculus (MA) that has been widely used to model mobility and concurrency. Our model, referred to as Labelled Mobile Ambients (LMA), assigns labels to ambients for tracking information flow in the system, and provides semantics for preserving the distributed information flow policy specified by the labels. While there exist variants of the mobile ambient calculus for modelling application specific aspects of mandatory access control like confidentiality and integrity in the literature, our LMA model subsumes these models by capturing confidentiality and integrity as special cases of information flow properties. Thus, the LMA model enables a wide range of applications with complex security requirements, and permits a simple static analysis to establish whether the system violates information flow policy. A relative comparison to other prominent works is provided highlighting the merits of our LMA.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
SIN '15: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Security of Information and Networks
September 2015
350 pages
ISBN:9781450334532
DOI:10.1145/2799979
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 08 September 2015

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SIN '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 34 of 92 submissions, 37%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 102 of 289 submissions, 35%

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