Quantifying information leakage in finite order deterministic programs

Abstract

Information flow analysis is a powerful technique for reasoning about the sensitive information exposed by a program during its execution. While past work has proposed information theoretic metrics (e.g., Shannon entropy, min-entropy, guessing entropy, etc.) to quantify such information leakage, we argue that some of these measures not only result in counter-intuitive measures of leakage, but also are inherently prone to conflicts when comparing two programs P 1 and P2 - say Shannon entropy predicts higher leakage for program P1, while guessing entropy predicts higher leakage for program P2. This paper presents the first attempt towards addressing such conflicts and derives solutions for conflict-free comparison of finite order deterministic programs. © 2011 IEEE.