Liquid information flow control
Name
3408987.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
662.03 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
266a483277fd961c73ea4a187ec95587
Author(s)
Polikarpova, Nadia
Stefan, Deian
Yang, Jean
Itzhaky, Shachar
Hance, Travis
Solar-Lezama, Armando
Date Issued
2020
Journal
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We present Lifty, a domain-specific language for data-centric applications that manipulate sensitive data. A Lifty programmer annotates the sources of sensitive data with declarative security policies, and the language statically and automatically verifies that the application handles the data according to the policies. Moreover, if verification fails, Lifty suggests a provably correct repair, thereby easing the programmer burden of implementing policy enforcing code throughout the application. The main insight behind Lifty is to encode information flow control using liquid types, an expressive yet decidable type system. Liquid types enable fully automatic checking of complex, data dependent policies, and power our repair mechanism via type-driven error localization and patch synthesis. Our experience using Lifty to implement three case studies from the literature shows that (1) the Lifty policy language is sufficiently expressive to specify many real-world policies, (2) the Lifty type checker is able to verify secure programs and find leaks in insecure programs quickly, and (3) even if the programmer leaves out all policy enforcing code, the Lifty repair engine is able to patch all leaks automatically within a reasonable time.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3408987
