Information Flow in Systems with Schedulers

Abstract. The focus of work on information flow security has primarily been on definitions of security in asynchronous systems models. This paper considers systems with schedulers, which require synchronous variants of these definitions. In particular, it studies the dependence of these variant definitions of security on implementation details of the scheduler. Such independence is shown to hold for synchronous variants of trace-based definitions, but not for a bisimulation-based definition. An approach to the latter problem is proposed that preserves the attractive computational properties of the bisimulation-based definition. Information flow security is concerned with the ability of agents in a system to make deductions about the activity of others, or to cause information to flow to other agents. Since the seminal work of Goguen and Meseguer [GM82], which introduced the notion of noninterference in a deterministic state machine model, a significant body of literature has ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CSFW
• Authors: Ron van der Meyden, Chenyi Zhang
• Keywords: Asynchronous Systems Models, CSFW 2008, Information flow Security, Security Privacy, Synchronous Variants