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Quantitative information flow, with a view

Boreale, Michele and Pampaloni, Francesca and Paolini, Michela Quantitative information flow, with a view. In: Computer Security – ESORICS 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6879 (6879). Springer, pp. 588-606. ISBN 978-3-642-23821-5 (2011)

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Abstract

We put forward a general model intended for assessment of system security against passive eavesdroppers, both quantitatively ( how much information is leaked) and qualitatively ( what properties are leaked). To this purpose, we extend information hiding systems ( ihs ), a model where the secret-observable relation is represented as a noisy channel, with views : basically, partitions of the state-space. Given a view W and n independent observations of the system, one is interested in the probability that a Bayesian adversary wrongly predicts the class of W the underlying secret belongs to. We offer results that allow one to easily characterise the behaviour of this error probability as a function of the number of observations, in terms of the channel matrices defining the ihs and the view W . In particular, we provide expressions for the limit value as n → ∞, show by tight bounds that convergence is exponential, and also characterise the rate of convergence to predefined error thresholds. We then show a few instances of statistical attacks that can be assessed by a direct application of our model: attacks against modular exponentiation that exploit timing leaks, against anonymity in mix-nets and against privacy in sparse datasets.

Item Type: Book Section
Identification Number: 10.1007/978-3-642-23822-2_32
Additional Information: Proceedings of the 16th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, Leuven, Belgium, September 12-14,2011
Funders: Work partially supported by the EU funded project Ascens
Uncontrolled Keywords: Quantitative information flow; statistical attacks; anonymity; privacy; information theory
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Research Area: Computer Science and Applications
Depositing User: Ms T. Iannizzi
Date Deposited: 27 Mar 2012 09:53
Last Modified: 28 Jul 2014 12:21
URI: http://eprints.imtlucca.it/id/eprint/1244

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