Engineering Commons^™

A Verified Information-Flow Architecture, Arthur Azevedo De Amorim, Nathan Collins, André Dehon, Delphine Demange, Cătălin Hriţcu, David Pichardie, Benjamin C. Pierce, Randy Pollack, Andrew Tolmach

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

SAFE is a clean-slate design for a highly secure computer system, with pervasive mechanisms for tracking and limiting information flows. At the lowest level, the SAFE hardware supports fine-grained programmable tags, with efficient and flexible propagation and combination of tags as instructions are executed. The operating system virtualizes these generic facilities to present an information-flow abstract machine that allows user programs to label sensitive data with rich confidentiality policies. We present a formal, machine-checked model of the key hardware and software mechanisms used to dynamically control information flow in SAFE and an end-to-end proof of noninterference for this model. We …