EPSRC logo

Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: EP/C525701/1
Title: An Operational Approach to the Measurement of Information Flow Quantity
Principal Investigator: Clark, Dr DJ
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department: Computer Science
Organisation: Kings College London
Scheme: Overseas Travel Grants Pre-FEC
Starts: 27 April 2005 Ends: 26 July 2005 Value (£): 1,435
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Fundamentals of Computing Software Engineering
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Information Technologies
Related Grants:
Panel History:  
Summary on Grant Application Form
Suppose that you have a program that has to keep some information secret, say bank account details. Usually we would try to write such a program so that it was impossible to learn any secret information. But in the real world of real programs often programs do need to leak secrets. This is OK if not too much is given away. In my recent research my collaborators and I have demonstrated that it is possible to measure the amount of the secret that is leaked by running a program under an attack from someone who knows the source code, as long as you know some information about the probabilities of getting the different possible inputs. A problem with what we have achieved so far is that the upper bound on the information leaked from loops in a program is often too high. We would like to be able to give a more precise bound in more cases. Another problem is that we have only put a bound on the total amount possibly leaked by the loop during the program. It would be useful to be able to talk about rates at which a program leaks secret information. Both of these problems can be addressed by modelling a program as something controlled by a clock and executing steps in time with ticks of this clock. There is still the problem that different inputs to the program can cause the program to take different paths, even within a loop. We will investigate how to take account of this.
Key Findings
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
Potential use in non-academic contexts
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
Impacts
Description This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
Summary
Date Materialised
Sectors submitted by the Researcher
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
Project URL:  
Further Information:  
Organisation Website: