Abstract

Our society’s widespread dependence on networked information systems for everything from personal finance to military communications makes it essential to improve the security of software. Standard security mechanisms such as access control and encryption are essential components for protecting information, but they do not provide end-to-end guarantees. Programming-languages research has demonstrated that security concerns can be addressed by using both program analysis and program rewriting as powerful and flexible enforcement mechanisms. This thesis investigates security-typed programming languages, which use static typing to enforce information-flow security policies. These languages allow the programmer to specify confidentiality and integrity constraints on the data used in a program; the compiler verifies that the program satisfies the constraints. Previous theoretical security-typed languages research has focused on simple models of computation and unrealistically idealized security policies. The existing practical security-typed languages have not been proved to guarantee security. This thesis addresses these limitations in several ways.

Citations