Efficient incremental information flow control with nested control regions

Mobile application platforms like cell phones are ubiquitous today. Even on limited devices, users expect well-performing applications that also respect the privacy of the user's stored data, such as messages, addresses and calendar items. Existing techniques, however, do not provide an adequate solution: Dynamic algorithms incur a significant space and time overhead. Static approaches help a developer in creating secure programs, but previous work requires a whole-program verification. This paper proposes a novel intermediate representation that is designed to be easily analyzed and verified by clients as well as support incremental verification. The IR can be verified with a single-pass, linear time algorithm. The resulting reduction of memory requirements is particularly important for limited mobile devices. Metadata, including security properties, can be reliably transmitted through annotatable type systems, as demonstrated by the adoption of a practical security-enhanced programming language as an input for our intermediate representation. A simplified imperative language with incremental loading is formally proved safe as a foundation for the practical implementation.

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