Transparent IFC Enforcement: Possibility and (In)Efficiency Results
Maximilian Algehed, Cormac Flanagan

TL;DR
This paper investigates the feasibility and efficiency of transparent enforcement of Information Flow Control (IFC), demonstrating fundamental limitations on the performance of multi-execution-based techniques and addressing open questions about enforcing security conditions.
Contribution
It proves that transparent enforcement is inherently polynomially equivalent to multi-execution and that black-box enforcement is exponentially costly, highlighting fundamental efficiency barriers.
Findings
All transparent enforcement is polynomial time equivalent to multi-execution.
Black-box enforcement incurs exponential time complexity with respect to the number of principals.
The paper confirms the possibility of transparently enforcing the TINI security condition.
Abstract
Information Flow Control (IFC) is a collection of techniques for ensuring a no-write-down no-read-up style security policy known as noninterference. Traditional methods for both static and dynamic IFC suffer from untenable numbers of false alarms on real-world programs. Secure Multi-Execution (SME) promises to provide secure IFC without modifying the behaviour of already secure programs, a property known as transparency. Implementations of SME exist for the web and as plug-ins to several programming languages. Furthermore, SME can in theory work in a black-box manner, meaning that it can be programming language agnostic, making it perfect for securing legacy or third-party systems. As such SME, and its variants like Multiple Facets (MF) and Faceted Secure Multi-Execution (FSME), appear to be a family of panaceas for the security engineer. The question is, how come, given all these…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
