RedFlag: Reducing Inadvertent Leaks by Personal Machines
Landon P. Cox, Peter J. Gilbert · 2009
Reference monitors rely on correct access-control policies to prevent confidential data from leaking. Unfortunately, sensitive data is increasingly stored on personal machines operated by users who are either unwilling or unqualified to properly protect their sensitive files. This often leads to misconfigured applications and damaging leaks. In this paper, we describe RedFlag, a system designed to unobtrusively identify and protect sensitive files on personal machines. Our main insight is that personal machines often receive sensitive data from servers over encrypted network connections. Using this heuristic allows RedFlag to help prevent large classes of leaks, without requiring user-defined policies or changes to existing server-side and client-side applications.