Preserving information flow properties under refinement

Abstract

In a stepwise development process, it is essential that system properties that have been already investigated in some phase need not be re-investigated in later phases. In formal developments, this corresponds to the requirement that properties are presented under refinement. While safety and liveness properties are indeed preserved under most standard forms of refinement, it is well known that this is, in general, not true for information flow properties, a large and useful class of security properties. We propose a collection of refinement operators as a solution to this problem. We prove that these operators preserve information flow as well as other system properties. Thus, information flow properties become compatible with stepwise development. Moreover we show that our operators are an optimal solution.