Managing Policy Updates in Security-Typed Languages

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Date
2006-04-06Author
Swamy, N.
Hicks, M.
Tse, S.
Zdancewic, S.
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Show full item recordAbstract
This paper presents RX, a new security-typed
programming language with features intended to make the management of
information-flow policies more practical. Security labels in RX,
in contrast to prior approaches, are defined in terms of owned
roles, as found in the RT role-based trust-management framework.
Role-based security policies allow flexible delegation, and our
language RX provides constructs through which programs can robustly
update policies and react to policy updates dynamically. Our dynamic
semantics use statically verified transactions to eliminate
illegal information flows across updates, which we call
transitive flows. Because policy updates can be observed
through dynamic queries, policy updates can potentially reveal
sensitive information. As such, RX considers policy statements
themselves to be potentially confidential information and subject to
information-flow metapolicies.