Trustworthy Systems

An axiomatization of information flow measures

Authors

Mário S. Alvim, Konstantinos Chatzikokolakis, Annabelle McIver, Carroll Morgan, Catuscia Palamidessi and Geoffrey Smith

    School of Computer Science and Engineering
    UNSW,
    Sydney 2052, Australia

Abstract

Quantitative information flow aims to assess and control the leakage of sensitive information by computer systems. A key insight in this area is that no single leakage measure is appropriate in all operational scenarios; as a result, many leakage measures have been proposed, with many different properties. To clarify this complex situation, this paper studies information leakage axiomatically, showing important dependencies among different axioms. It also establishes a completeness result about the g-leakage family, showing that any leakage measure satisfying certain intuitively-reasonable properties can be expressed as a g-leakage.

BibTeX Entry

  @article{Alvim_KMMPS_19,
    author           = {Mário S. Alvim and Konstantinos Chatzikokolakis and Annabelle McIver and Carroll Morgan and Catuscia
                        Palamidessi and Geoffrey Smith},
    doi              = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tcs.2018.10.016},
    issn             = {0304-3975},
    journal          = {Theoretical Computer Science},
    keywords         = {Information flow, Vulnerability, Information theory, Confidentiality, Axioms},
    note             = {In memory of Maurice Nivat, a founding father of Theoretical Computer Science --- Part I},
    pages            = {32-54},
    paperurl         = {https://trustworthy.systems/publications/papers/Alvim_KMMPS_19.pdf},
    title            = {An axiomatization of information flow measures},
    url              = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304397518306376},
    volume           = {777},
    year             = {2019}
  }

Download