Efficient user-space information flow control
Ben Niu, Gang Tan · 2013
The model of Decentralized Information Flow Control (DIFC) is effective at improving application security and can support rich confidentiality and integrity policies. We describe the design and implementation of duPro, an efficient user-space information flow control framework. duPro adopts Software-based Fault Isolation (SFI) to isolate protection domains within the same process. It controls the end-to-end information flow at the granularity of SFI domains. Being a user-space framework, duPro does not require any OS changes. Since SFI is more lightweight than hardware-based isolation (e.g., OS processes), the inter-domain communication and scheduling in duPro are more efficient than process-level DIFC systems. Finally, duPro supports a novel checkpointing-restoration mechanism for efficiently reusing protection domains. Experiments demonstrate applications can be ported to duPro with negligible overhead, enhanced security, and with tight control over information flow.