Michael R. Clarkson

dblp:85/6767 · DBLP profile ↗
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16ranked-venue papers
7as first author
1since 2021 · last 2022
—ORCID · none

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Security and privacy · 11 · 6 first-authorSoftware engineering, systems software and programming languages · 3Theory of computation · 2 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1 · 1 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2022 Surveying definitions of election verifiability
Ben Smyth, Michael R. Clarkson
Inf. Process. Lett.2
2015 Du-Vote: Remote Electronic Voting with Untrusted Computers
abstract
Du-Vote is a new remote electronic voting protocol that eliminates the often-required assumption that voters trust general-purpose computers. Trust is distributed in Du-Vote between a simple hardware token issued to the voter, the voter's computer, and a server run by election authorities. Verifiability is guaranteed with high probability even if all these machines are controlled by the adversary, and privacy is guaranteed as long as at least either the voter's computer, or the server and the hardware token, are not controlled by the adversary. The design of the Du-Vote protocol is presented in this paper. A new non-interactive zero-knowledge proof is employed to verify the server's computations. Du-Vote is a step towards tackling the problem of internet voting on user machines that are likely to have malware. We anticipate that the methods of Du-Vote can be used in other applications to find ways of achieving malware tolerance, that is, ways of securely using platforms that are known or suspected to have malware.
Gurchetan S. Grewal, Mark Ryan 0001, Liqun Chen 0002, Michael R. Clarkson
CSF4
2015 Checking Interaction-Based Declassification Policies for Android Using Symbolic Execution
Kristopher K. Micinski, Jonathan Fetter-Degges, Jinseong Jeon, Jeffrey S. Foster, Michael R. Clarkson
ESORICS (2)5
2015 Quantification of integrity
abstract
Three integrity measures are introduced: contamination, channel suppression and program suppression. Contamination is a measure of how much untrusted information reaches trusted outputs; it is the dual of leakage, which is a measure of information-flow confidentiality. Channel suppression is a measure of how much information about inputs to a noisy channel is missing from the channel outputs. And program suppression is a measure of how much information about the correct output of a program is lost because of attacker influence and implementation errors. Program and channel suppression do not have interesting confidentiality duals. As a case study, a quantitative relationship between integrity, confidentiality and database privacy is examined.
Michael R. Clarkson, Fred B. Schneider
Math. Struct. Comput. Sci.1
2014 Quantifying Information Flow for Dynamic Secrets
abstract
A metric is proposed for quantifying leakage of information about secrets and about how secrets change over time. The metric is used with a model of information flow for probabilistic, interactive systems with adaptive adversaries. The model and metric are implemented in a probabilistic programming language and used to analyze several examples. The analysis demonstrates that adaptivity increases information flow.
Piotr Mardziel, Mário S. Alvim, Michael Hicks 0001, Michael R. Clarkson
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy4
2013 Belief semantics of authorization logic
abstract
A formal belief semantics for authorization logics is given. The belief semantics is proved to subsume a standard Kripke semantics. The belief semantics yields a direct representation of principals' beliefs, without resorting to the technical machinery used in Kripke semantics. A proof system is given for the logic; that system is proved sound with respect to the belief and Kripke semantics. The soundness proofs are mechanized in Coq.
Andrew K. Hirsch, Michael R. Clarkson
CCS2
2010 Quantification of Integrity
abstract
Two kinds of integrity measures-contamination and suppression-are introduced. Contamination measures how much untrusted information reaches trusted outputs; it is the dual of information-flow confidentiality. Suppression measures how much information is lost from outputs; it does not have a confidentiality dual. Two forms of suppression are considered: programs and channels. Program suppression measures how much information about the correct output of a program is lost because of attacker influence and implementation errors. Channel suppression measures how much information about inputs to a noisy channel is missing from channel outputs. The relationship between quantitative integrity, confidentiality, and database privacy is examined.
Michael R. Clarkson, Fred B. Schneider
CSF1
2010 Hyperproperties
abstract
Trace properties, which have long been used for reasoning about systems, are sets of execution traces. Hyperproperties, introduced here, are sets of trace properties. Hyperproperties can express security policies, such as secure information flow and service level agreements, that trace properties c annot. Safety and liveness are generalized to hyperproperties, and every hyperproperty is shown to be the intersection of a safety hyperproperty and a liveness hyperproperty. A verification technique for safety hyperproperties is given and is shown to generalize prior techniques for verifying secure information flow. Refinement is shown to be applicable with safety hyperproperties. A topological characterization of hyperproperties is given.
Michael R. Clarkson, Fred B. Schneider
J. Comput. Secur.1
2009 Quantifying information flow with beliefs
abstract
To reason about information flow, a new model is developed that describes how attacker beliefs change due to the attacker's observation of the execution of a probabilistic (or deterministic) program. The model enables compositional reasoning about in
Michael R. Clarkson, Andrew C. Myers, Fred B. Schneider
J. Comput. Secur.1
2008 Hyperproperties
abstract
Properties, which have long been used for reasoning about systems, are sets of traces. Hyperproperties, introduced here, are sets of properties. Hyperproperties can express security policies, such as secure information flow, that properties cannot. Safety and liveness are generalized to hyperproperties, and every hyperproperty is shown to be the intersection of a safety hyperproperty and a liveness hyperproperty. A verification technique for safety hyperproperties is given and is shown to generalize prior techniques for verifying secure information flow. Refinement is shown to be valid for safety hyperproperties. A topological characterization of hyperproperties is given.
Michael R. Clarkson, Fred B. Schneider
CSF1
2008 Civitas: Toward a Secure Voting System
abstract
Civitas is the first electronic voting system that is coercion-resistant, universally and voter verifiable, and suitable for remote voting. This paper describes the design and implementation of Civitas. Assurance is established in the design through security proofs, and in the implementation through information-flow security analysis. Experimental results give a quantitative evaluation of the tradeoffs between time, cost, and security.
Michael R. Clarkson, Stephen Chong, Andrew C. Myers
SP1
2006 Information-Flow Security for Interactive Programs
abstract
Interactive programs allow users to engage in input and output throughout execution. The ubiquity of such programs motivates the development of models for reasoning about their information-flow security, yet no such models seem to exist for imperative programming languages. Further, existing language-based security conditions founded on noninteractive models permit insecure information flows in interactive imperative programs. This paper formulates new strategy-based information-flow security conditions for a simple imperative programming language that includes input and output operators. The semantics of the language enables a fine-grained approach to the resolution of nondeterministic choices. The security conditions leverage this approach to prohibit refinement attacks while still permitting observable nondeterminism. Extending the language with probabilistic choice yields a corresponding definition of probabilistic noninterference. A soundness theorem demonstrates the feasibility of statically enforcing the security conditions via a simple type system. These results constitute a step toward understanding and enforcing information-flow security in real-world programming languages, which include similar input and output operators
Kevin R. O'Neill, Michael R. Clarkson, Stephen Chong
CSFW2
2005 Belief in Information Flow
abstract
Information leakage traditionally has been defined to occur when uncertainty about secret data is reduced. This uncertainty-based approach is inadequate for measuring information flow when an attacker is making assumptions about secret inputs and these assumptions might be incorrect; such attacker beliefs are an unavoidable aspect of any satisfactory definition of leakage. To reason about information flow based on beliefs, a model is developed that describes how attacker beliefs change due to the attacker's observation of the execution of a probabilistic (or deterministic) program. The model leads to a new metric for quantitative information flow that measures accuracy rather than uncertainty of beliefs.
Michael R. Clarkson, Andrew C. Myers, Fred B. Schneider
CSFW1
2003 Polyglot: An Extensible Compiler Framework for Java
Nathaniel Nystrom, Michael R. Clarkson, Andrew C. Myers
CC2
2003 Response to "Comments on 'Formal Methods Application: An Empirical Tale of Software Development'"
abstract
We respond to criticism by D. Berry and W. Tichy of our paper that appeared in the March 2002 issue of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. Many of the supposed faults they identify in our experiment are a result of a misunderstanding on their part, while others are inherent aspects of an educational experiment. We present counterarguments that explain why our experiment is valid.
Ann E. Kelley Sobel, Michael R. Clarkson
IEEE Trans. Software Eng.2
2002 Formal Methods Application: An Empirical Tale of Software Development
abstract
The development of an elevator scheduling system by undergraduate students is presented. The development was performed by 20 teams of undergraduate students, divided into two groups. One group produced specifications by employing a formal method that involves only first-order logic. The other group used no formal analysis. The solutions of the groups are compared using the metrics of code correctness, conciseness, and complexity. Particular attention is paid to a subset of the formal methods group which provided a full verification of their implementation. Their results are compared to other published formal solutions. The formal methods group's solutions are found to be far more correct than the informal solutions.
Ann E. Kelley Sobel, Michael R. Clarkson
IEEE Trans. Software Eng.2