Quantitative Information Flow - Verification Hardness and Possibilities

TL;DR

This paper explores the complexity of verifying and comparing quantitative information flow in programs, revealing both hardness results and conditions under which such comparisons are tractable.

Contribution

It establishes that comparing information flow is generally hard but identifies specific cases where it becomes a 2-safety problem and can be efficiently checked.

Findings

Comparison of information flow is not a k-safety property for any k.

The comparison problem is #P-hard for loop-free boolean programs.

Universal quantification over distributions makes the problem a 2-safety problem.

Abstract

Researchers have proposed formal definitions of quantitative information flow based on information theoretic notions such as the Shannon entropy, the min entropy, the guessing entropy, and channel capacity. This paper investigates the hardness and possibilities of precisely checking and inferring quantitative information flow according to such definitions. We prove that, even for just comparing two programs on which has the larger flow, none of the definitions is a k-safety property for any k, and therefore is not amenable to the self-composition technique that has been successfully applied to precisely checking non-interference. We also show a complexity theoretic gap with non-interference by proving that, for loop-free boolean programs whose non-interference is coNP-complete, the comparison problem is #P-hard for all of the definitions. For positive results, we show that universally quantifying the distribution in the comparison problem, that is, comparing two programs according to the entropy based definitions on which has the larger flow for all distributions, is a 2-safety problem in general and is coNP-complete when restricted for loop-free boolean programs. We prove this by showing that the problem is equivalent to a simple relation naturally expressing the fact that one program is more secure than the other. We prove that the relation also refines the channel-capacity based definition, and that it can be precisely checked via the self-composition as well as the "interleaved" self-composition technique.