Affiliations: [a] German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3, 66123 Saarbrücken, Germany. E-mail: mantel@dfki.de | [b] Department of Computer Science, Upson Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA. E-mail: andrei@cs.cornell.edu
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author.
Note: [1] This is an extended version of the article [27] that appeared in Proceedings of the 14th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, 11–13 June 2001.
Note: [2] This work was partly supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Note: [3] This research was partly supported by the Department of the Navy, Office of Naval Research, ONR Grant N00014-01-1-0968. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations contained in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Office of Naval Research. This work was partly supported by TFR while this author was with the Department of Computer Science, Chalmers University of Technology and University of Göteborg, Sweden.
Abstract: The security of computation at the level of a specific programming language and the security of complex systems at a more abstract level are two major areas of current security research. With the objective to integrate the two, this article proposes an adequate translation of a timing-sensitive security property for simple multi-threaded programs into a more general security framework. Soundness and completeness of the translation guarantee that the trace-based specification of the translation of a multi-threaded program is secure if and only if the original program is secure. Finally, the translation is extended to a distributed setting, and it is demonstrated how to derive global security of the overall system from local security of each thread. The translation is presented as a two-step process where the first step is independent from the concrete programming language.
