A Theory of Noninterference for the π-Calculus [chapter]

Silvia Crafa, Sabina Rossi
2005 Lecture Notes in Computer Science  
We develop a theory of noninterference for a typed version of the πcalculus where types are used to assign secrecy levels to channels. We provide two equivalent characterizations of noninterference based on a typed behavioural equivalence relative to a security level σ, which captures the idea of external observers of level σ. The first characterization involves a universal quantification over all the possible active attacks, i.e., malicious processes which interact with the system possibly
more » ... ing secret information. The second definition of noninterference is expressed in terms of an unwinding condition, which deals with so-called passive attacks trying to infer confidential information just by observing the behaviour of the system. This unwinding-based characterization naturally leads to efficient methods for the verification and construction of (compositional) secure systems. Furthermore, we characterize noninterference in terms of bisimulation-like (partial) equivalence relations in the style of a stream of similar studies for other process calculi (e.g., CCS and CryptoSPA) and languages (e.g., imperative and multi-threaded languages).
doi:10.1007/11580850_2 fatcat:xlrmht6cqrfd7hzxvevhx3zzgu