Information Flow in Object-Oriented Software

This paper contributes to the investigation of object-sensitive information-flow properties for sequential Java, i.e., properties that take into account information leakage through objects, as opposed to primitive values. We present two improvements to a popular object-sensitive non-interference property. Both reduce the burden on analysis and monitoring tools. The second contribution is a formalization of this property in a program logic -- JavaDL in our case -- which allows using an existing tool without requiring program modification. The third contribution is a novel fine-grained specification methodology. In our approach, arbitrary JavaDL terms (read side-effect-free Java expressions) may be assigned a security level -- in contrast to security labels being attached to fields and variables only.