LeakWatch: Estimating information leakage from java programs

Tom Chothia, Yusuke Kawamoto, Chris Novakovic

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

27 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Programs that process secret data may inadvertently reveal information about those secrets in their publicly-observable output. This paper presents LeakWatch, a quantitative information leakage analysis tool for the Java programming language; it is based on a flexible "point-to-point" information leakage model, where secret and publicly-observable data may occur at any time during a program's execution. LeakWatch repeatedly executes a Java program containing both secret and publicly-observable data and uses robust statistical techniques to provide estimates, with confidence intervals, for min-entropy leakage (using a new theoretical result presented in this paper) and mutual information.We demonstrate how LeakWatch can be used to estimate the size of information leaks in a range of real-world Java programs.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationComputer Security - ESORICS 2014
Subtitle of host publication19th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, Wroclaw, Poland, September 7-11, 2014. Proceedings, Part II
EditorsMirosław Kutyłowski, Jaideep Vaidya
PublisherSpringer
Pages219-236
Number of pages18
Volume8713 LNCS
EditionPART 2
ISBN (Electronic)9783319112121
ISBN (Print)9783319112114
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2014
Event19th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, ESORICS 2014 - Wroclaw, Poland
Duration: 7 Sept 201411 Sept 2014

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
NumberPART 2
Volume8713 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference19th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, ESORICS 2014
Country/TerritoryPoland
CityWroclaw
Period7/09/1411/09/14

Keywords

  • java
  • min-entropy leakage
  • mutual information
  • quantitative information flow
  • statistical estimation

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science(all)
  • Theoretical Computer Science

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