Immutability and Encapsulation for Sound OO Information Flow Control

Abstract

Security-critical software applications contain confidential information which has to be protected from leaking to unauthorized systems. With language-based techniques, the confidentiality of applications can be enforced. Such techniques are for example type systems that enforce an information flow policy through typing rules. The precision of such type systems, especially in object-oriented languages, is an area of active research: an appropriate system should not reject too many secure programs while soundly preserving noninterference. In this work, we introduce the language SIFO which supports information flow control for an object-oriented language with type modifiers. Type modifiers increase the precision of the type system by utilizing immutability and uniqueness properties of objects for the detection of information leaks. We present SIFO informally by using examples to demonstrate the applicability of the language, formalize the type system, prove noninterference, implement SIFO as a pluggable type system in the programming language L42, and evaluate it with a feasibility study and a benchmark.