Dynamic Enforcement of Knowledge-Based Security Policies

—This paper explores the idea of knowledge-based security policies, which are used to decide whether to answer queries over secret data based on an estimation of the querier’s (possibly increased) knowledge given the results. Limiting knowledge is the goal of existing information release policies that employ mechanisms such as noising, anonymization, and redaction. Knowledge-based policies are more general: they increase flexibility by not fixing the means to restrict information flow. We enforce a knowledge-based policy by explicitly tracking a model of a querier’s belief about secret data, represented as a probability distribution, and denying any query that could increase knowledge above a given threshold. ment query analysis and belief tracking via abstract interpretation using a novel probabilistic polyhedral domain, whose design permits trading off precision with performance while ensuring estimates of a querier’s knowledge are sound. Experiments with our implementatio...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: CSFW
• Authors: Piotr Mardziel, Stephen Magill, Michael Hicks, Mudhakar Srivatsa
• Keywords: CSFW 2011, Polyhedral Domain, Probabilistic Computation, Probability Distribution, Security Privacy