Program Partitioning Using Dynamic Trust Models

Developing distributed applications is a difficult task. It is further complicated if system-wide security policies shall be specified and enforced, or if both data and hosts are owned by principals that do not fully trust each other, as is typically the case in service-oriented or gridbased scenarios. Language-based technologies have been suggested to support developers of those applications—the Decentralized Label Model and Secure Program Partitioning allow to annotate programs with security specifications, and to partition the annotated program across a set of hosts, obeying both the annotations and the trust relation between the principals. The resulting applications guarantee by construction that safety and confidentiality of both data and computations are ensured. In this work, we develop a generalised version of the splitting framework, that is parametrised in the trust component, and show the result of specialising it with different trust models. We also develop a metric to measure the quality of the result of the partitioning process.