A framework for specifying and formally verifying application security policies

One challenge of building software applications that handle sensitive information is ensuring that they meet certain security and privacy policies, which guide how the application should be written in order to satisfy particular security properties. Common examples of security policies include information-flow control and access control. In complex applications, which can be composed of many stateful components, it is hard to reason about all possible interactions and check that a policy is satisfied in every case. In this thesis, we present work on a new static-analysis framework in the Coq proof assistant to verify that implementations of applications meet their specified security policies, using proofs of indistinguishability of labeled transition systems. The primary goal of our framework is to be applicable to a wide variety of applications and policies, moreso than existing analysis tools. In addition to a formalization of applications and policies, we discuss some theorems to reduce manual proof effort and enable modular development. Finally, we apply our framework to some simple examples.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Shao, Christopher,M. Eng.Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Adam Chlipala.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123144

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/123144