Information flow control in object-oriented systems

In this paper, we describe a high assurance discretionary access control model for object-oriented systems. The model not only ensures protection against Trojan horses leaking information, but provides the flexibility of discretionary access control at the same time. The basic idea of our approach is to check all information flows among objects in the system in order to block possible illegal flows. An illegal flow arises when information is transmitted from one object to another object in violation of the security policy. The interaction modes among objects are taken into account in determining illegal flows. We consider three different interaction modes that are standard interaction modes found in the open distributed processing models. The paper presents formal definitions and proof of correctness of our flow control algorithm. Index Terms - Object-oriented databases and systems, security, discretionary access control, mandatory access control, Trojan horse, distributed processing.