Causality and Accountability

Dominic Duggan, Ye Wu

Abstract: Noninterference is a standard correctness condition for information flow control, but achieving it may sometimes be too expensive to be practical, particularly for distributed applications. A framework is introduced for specifying what forms of information flow control should be secured. Accountable noninterference requires that there be no information leaks via accountable information flows. An example application is in delineating sequential and distributed information flows, allowing different enforcement mechanisms for each. As such, the framework allows the specification of mechanism, dual to policy, in information flow control.