Towards SOS Meta-Theory for Language-Based Security (Position Paper)

SOS meta-theory [1] has been very successful in defining general criteria using which one can guarantee useful properties about the language constructs. These meta-theorems can save pages of standard proof thanks to their generic and language-independent formulation. Security properties of language constructs look like promising candidates to be turned into SOS meta-theorems and there has already been an attempt in this direction [8] in the context of process calculi security [2]. In this paper, we give an exploratory account of this issue in the context of language-based security [7]. A number of the ideas presented here can be taken directly to the process calculi security. In the rest of this paper, we give a superficial overview of information-flow security [7] and in particular non-interference [3] as a central notion in this field. Then, we explore some interesting links between non-interference and our recent work on notions of bisimulation with data [4]. Some ideas regarding SOS meta-theorems for these notions will follow in Section 3. Section 4 concludes the paper and points out future work.