A library for light-weight information-flow security in haskell

Protecting confidentiality of data has become increasingly important for computing systems. Information-flow techniques have been developed over the years to achieve that purpose, leading to special-purpose languages that guarantee information-flow security in programs. However, rather than producing a new language from scratch, information-flow security can also be provided as a library. This has been done previously in Haskell using the arrow framework. In this paper, we show that arrows are not necessary to design such libraries and that a less general notion, namely monads, is sufficient to achieve the same goals. We present a monadic library to provide information-flow security for Haskell programs. The library introduces mechanisms to protect confidentiality of data for pure computations, that we then easily, and modularly, extend to include dealing with side-effects. We also present combinators to dynamically enforce different declassification policies when release of i...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: HASKELL
• Authors: Alejandro Russo, Koen Claessen, John Hughes
• Keywords: HASKELL 2008, Information-flow Security, Library Introduces Mechanisms, Programming Languages, Special-purpose Languages