A Generic Approach to the Security of Multi-Threaded Programs

The security of computation at the level of a specific programming language and the security of complex systems at a more abstract level are two major areas of current security research. With the objective to integrate the two, this article proposes a translation of a timing-sensitive security property for simple multi-threaded programs into a more general security framework. Interestingly, our notion of security for programs is bisimulation-based while the security framework is trace-based. Nevertheless, we show that the translation is sound and complete in the sense that the trace-based specification which results from the translation of a multi-threaded program is secure if and only if the original program is secure. The translation is presented as a two-step process where the first step is independent from the concrete programming language.