A metadata calculus for secure information sharing

In both commercial and defense sectors a compelling need is emerging for rapid, yet secure, dissemination of information to the concerned actors. Traditional approaches to information sharing that rely on security labels (e.g., Multi-Level Security (MLS)) suffer from at least two major drawbacks. First, static security labels do not account for tactical information whose value decays over time. Second, MLS-like approaches have often ignored information transform semantics when deducing security labels (e.g., output security label = max over all input security labels). While MLS-like label deduction appears to be conservative, we argue that this approach can result in both underestimation and overestimation of security labels. We contend that overestimation may adversely throttle information flows, while underestimation incites information misuse and leakage. In this paper we present a novel calculus approach to securely share tactical information. We model security metadata as a vec...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CCS
• Authors: Mudhakar Srivatsa, Dakshi Agrawal, Steffen Reidt
• Keywords: CCS 2009, Metadata, Metadata Vector, Security Labels, Security Privacy