Title
Access Control and Information Flow in Transactional Memory
Abstract
The paper considers the addition of access control to a number of transactional memory implementations, and studies its impact on the information flow security of such systems. Even after the imposition of access control, the Unbounded Transactional Memory due to Ananian et al, and most instances of a general scheme for transactional conflict detection and arbitration due to Scott, are shown to be insecure. This result applies even for a very simple policy prohibiting information flow from a high to a low security domain. The source of the insecurity is identified as the ability of agents to cause aborts of other agents' transactions. A generic implementation is defined, parameterized by a "may-abort" relation that defines which agents may cause aborts of other agents' transactions. This implementation is shown to be secure with respect to an intransitive information flow policy consistent with the access control table and "may-abort" relation. Using this result, Transactional Memory Coherence and Consistency, an implementation due to Hammond et al, is shown to be secure with respect to intransitive information flow policies. Moreover, it is shown how to modify Scott's arbitration policies using the may-abort relation, yielding a class of secure implementations closely related to Scott's scheme.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1007/978-3-642-01465-9_21
Formal Aspects in Security and Trust
Keywords
Field
DocType
generic implementation,transactional memory implementation,information flow security,information flow,may-abort relation,access control,transactional memory,access control table,information flow policy,intransitive information flow policy,secure implementation
Security domain,Software transactional memory,Information flow (information theory),Computer science,Computer security,Covert channel,Transactional memory,Access control,Arbitration,Transactional leadership
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
5491
0302-9743
2
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.43
10
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ariel Cohen1865.63
van der meyden2994157.60
Lenore D. Zuck31559141.69