Information Flow Certificates

Information flow analysis investigates the flow of data in applications, checking in particular for flows from private sources to public sinks. Flow- and path-sensitive analyses are, however, often too costly to be performed every time a security-critical application is run. In this paper, we propose a variant of proof carrying code for information flow security. To this end, we develop information flow (IF) certificates which get attached to programs as well as a method for IF certificate validation. We prove soundness of our technique, i.e., show it to be tamper-free. The technique is implemented within the program analysis tool CPAchecker. Our experiments confirm that the use of certificates pays off for costly analysis runs.