Information flow in secure contexts

Information flow Security in a multilevel system aims at guaranteeing that no high level information is revealed to low level user, even in the presence of any possible malicious process. This requirment could be stronger than necessary when some knowledge about the environment (context) in which the process is going to run is available. To relax this requirment we introduce the notion of secure contexts for a class of processes. This notion is parametric with respect to both the observation equivalance and the operation used to characterize the low level view of a process. As observation equivalance we consider the cases of weak bisimulation and trace equivalance. We describe how to build secure context in these cases and we show that two well-known security properties, named BNDC and NDC. are just special instances of our general notion.

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