Towards a General-Purpose Dynamic Information Flow Policy

Abstract: Noninterference offers a rigorous end-to-end guarantee for secure propagation of information. However, real-world systems almost always involve security requirements that change during program execution, making noninterference inapplicable. Prior works alleviate the limitation to some extent, but even for a veteran in information flow security, understanding the subtleties in the syntax and semantics of each policy is challenging, largely due to very different policy specification languages, and more fundamentally, semantic requirements of each policy. We take a top-down approach and present a novel information flow policy, called Dynamic Release, which allows information flow restrictions to downgrade and upgrade in arbitrary ways. Dynamic Release is formalized on a novel framework that, for the first time, allows us to compare and contrast various dynamic policies in the literature. We show that Dynamic Release generalizes declassification, erasure, delegation and revocation. Moreover, it is the only dynamic policy that is both applicable and correct on a benchmark of tests with dynamic policy.