Quantitative Analysis of Secure Information Flow via Probabilistic Semantics

We present an automatic analyzer for measuring information flow within software systems. In this paper, we quantify leakage in terms of information theory and incorporate this computation into probabilistic semantics. Our semantic functions provide information flow measurement for programs given secure inputs under any probability distribution. The major contribution is an automatic quantitative analyzer based on the leakage definition for such a language. While-loops are handled by applying entropy of generalized distributions and related properties in order to provide the analysis with the ability to incorporate the observation of elapsed time.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: IEEEARES
• Authors: Chunyan Mu, David Clark
• Keywords: Automatic Quantitative Analyzer, IEEEARES 2009, Information Flow, Information Flow Measurement, Security Privacy