The DOI matches its Crossref record; 160 of the 164 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Language-based information-flow security
Abstract
Current standard security practices do not provide substantial assurance that the end-to-end behavior of a computing system satisfies important security policies such as confidentiality. An end-to-end confidentiality policy might assert that secret input data cannot be inferred by an attacker through the attacker's observations of system output; this policy regulates information flow. Conventional security mechanisms such as access control and encryption do not directly address the enforcement of information-flow policies. Previously, a promising new approach has been developed: the use of programming-language techniques for specifying and enforcing information-flow policies. In this paper, we survey the past three decades of research on information-flow security, particularly focusing on work that uses static program analysis to enforce information-flow policies. We give a structured view of work in the area and identify some important open challenges.
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“As tasks are decomposed across agents, intermediate outputs (e.g., summaries, plans, or tool calls) may implicitly encode or propagate sensitive information beyond intended scopes, creating implicit information flows that bypass explicit access controls (Denning, 1976;Sabelfeld & Myers, 2003).”
From Open Challenges in Multi-Agent Security: Towards Secure Systems of Interacting AI Agents (2025) · cites this paper as Sabelfeld & Myers, 2003
Citations
Cites
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Cited by
Sorted by citations
TaintDroid: an information-flow tracking system for realtime privacy monitoring on smartphones
Enck, W., Gilbert, P., Chun, B.-G., Cox, L. P., Jung, J., McDaniel, P. D., & Sheth, A. N. (2010) · doi:10.5555/1924943.1924971 · Cited by 2,259
Enck (2014) · doi:10.1145/2619091 · Cited by 1,203
Schwartz, E. J., Avgerinos, T., & Brumley, D. (2010) · IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) · doi:10.1109/sp.2010.26 · Cited by 727
Sampson, A., Dietl, W., Fortuna, E., Gnanapragasam, D., Ceze, L., & Grossman, D. (2011) · ACM SIGPLAN Notices · doi:10.1145/1993316.1993518 · Cited by 589
On the Foundations of Quantitative Information Flow
Smith, G. (2009) · Lecture notes in computer science · doi:10.1007/978-3-642-00596-1_21 · Cited by 571
Metadata
- Authors
- Sabelfeld, A., & Myers, A. C.
- Affiliations
- Cornell University (US)
- Venue
- IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
- Published
- 2003-01
- Volume
- 21
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 5-19
- ISSN
- 0733-8716 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2122049982
- Cited by
- 1,907
- References
- 164
- Citations by year
- 2026: 29 · 2025: 38 · 2024: 45 · 2023: 43 · 2022: 50 · 2021: 65 · 2020: 56 · 2019: 87 · 2018: 67 · 2017: 83 · 2016: 77 · 2015: 101 · 2014: 135 · 2013: 105 · 2012: 122
- FWCI
- 97.28
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Hardware and Architecture › Security and Verification in Computing
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Software › Logic, programming, and type systems
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Networks and Communications › Cryptography and Data Security
- Keywords
- information flow security, confidentiality, static analysis, information flow policies, programming languages, policy enforcement, end-to-end security, open problems
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