Protecting privacy using the decentralized label model

Abstract

Stronger protection is needed for the confidentiality and integrity of data, because programs containing untrusted code are the rule rather than the exception. Information flow control allows the enforcement of end-to-end security policies, but has been difficult to put into practice. This article describes the decentralized label model, a new label model for control of information flow in systems with mutual distrust and decentralized authority. The model improves on existing multilevel security models by allowing users to declassify information in a decentralized way, and by improving support for fine-grained data sharing. It supports static program analysis of information flow, so that programs can be certified to permit only acceptable information flows, while largely avoiding the overhead of run-time checking. The article introduces the language Jif, an extension to Java that provides static checking of information flow using the decentralized label model.