Channel Capacity of Concurrent Probabilistic Programs

Abstract

Programs are under continuous attack for disclosing secret information, and defending against these attacks is becoming increasingly vital. An attractive approach for protection is to measure the amount of secret information that might leak to attackers. A fundamental issue in computing information leakage is that given a program and attackers with various knowledge of the secret information, what is the maximum amount of leakage of the program? This is called channel capacity. In this paper, two notions of capacity are defined for concurrent probabilistic programs using information theory. These definitions consider intermediate leakage and the scheduler effect. These capacities are computed by a constrained nonlinear optimization problem. Therefore, an evolutionary algorithm is proposed to compute the capacities. Single preference voting and dining cryptographers protocols are analyzed as case studies to show how the proposed approach can automatically compute the capacities. The results demonstrate that there are attackers who can learn the whole secret of both the single preference protocol and dining cryptographers protocol. The proposed evolutionary algorithm is a general approach for computing any type of capacity in any kind of program.