An Information Flow Approach to Data Security

过去，计算机安全从业者主要关注防御黑客、恶意软件、蠕虫和机器人，这些黑客、恶意软件、蠕虫和机器人的目的是让恶意代码在受害者的机器上运行，并窃取受害者的计算资源。然而，现代计算机系统是如此复杂，以至于确保它们的安全似乎几乎是不可能的--几乎每个月都会发生安全漏洞，成为头条新闻。这一严峻的现实将导致计算机安全方面的根本性变化。计算硬件成本的下降意味着计算资源的安全漏洞成本更低。相反，必须保护的是保存在计算机上的宝贵数据。正因为如此，在接下来的几年里，计算机安全将从资源保护问题转变为数据保护问题。这项提案将解决的主要问题是，尽管计算机系统受到损害，但仍要保护数字数据。要做到这一点，这项提议将重新审视一个古老的想法--信息流跟踪和控制，这一想法长期以来一直被用来保护高成本的军事系统。这项提案将解决的关键挑战将是展示信息流如何实际应用于个人用户和普通企业使用的各种商品计算机系统。我们将调查信息流在各种现代计算系统上的使用，从微型智能手机到大规模的服务器云。如果成功，这项研究将为世界铺平道路，在这个世界里，普通用户可以保证他们的数字数据是安全的，不会出现安全漏洞。

In the past, computer security practitioners were largely concerned with defending against hackers, malware, worms and bots, whose purpose was to get malicious code running on victim machines and steal the victim's computing resources. However, modern computer systems are so complex that securing them seems nearly impossible -- barely a month goes by without a security breach making headlines. This grim reality will give rise to a fundamental change in computer security. The falling cost of computing hardware means that security breaches of computing resources are less costly. Rather, it is the valuable data kept on computers that must be protected. Because of this, the next few years will see the transformation of computer security from a resource-protection problem to a data-protection problem. The main problem this proposal will address is the protection of digital data in spite of computer systems compromises. To do this, this proposal will revisit an old idea - information flow tracking and control, which has long been used to protect high-cost military systems. The key challenge this proposal will address, will be to show that how information flow can be practically applied to a variety commodity computer systems used by individual users and average businesses. We will investigate the use of information flow on a variety of modern computing systems, from tiny smart phones to massive clouds of servers. If successful, this research will pave the way to a world where the average user can be assured that their digital data is safe from security breaches.