Security Correctness for Secure Nested Transactions

This article considers the synthesis of two long-standing lines of research in computer security: security correctness for multilevel databases, and language-based security. The motivation is an approach to supporting multilevel and multilateral security for a wide class of enterprise applications, those of concurrent transactional applications. The approach extends nested transactions with retroactive abort, a new form of semantics for transactional execution, motivated by security concerns. A semantics is given in terms of a local constrained labelled transition system, the TauOne calculus. This allows a noninterference result to be verified based on adapting results on observational equivalence from concurrency theory.