A sound type system for secure flow analysis

Abstract

Ensuring secure information flow within programs in the context of multiple sensitivity levels has been widely studied. Especially noteworthy is Denning's work in secure flow analysis and the lattice model [6,7]. Until now, however, the soundness of Denning's analysis has not been established satisfactorily. We formulate Denning's approach as a type system and present a notion of soundness for the system that can be viewed as a form of noninterference. Soundness is established by proving, with respect to a standard programming language semantics, that all well-typed programs have this noninterference property.