An Information Flow Monitor for a Core of DOM - Introducing References and Live Primitives

We propose and prove sound a novel, purely dynamic, flowsensitive monitor for securing information flow in an imperative language extended with DOM-like tree operations, that we call Core DOM. In Core DOM, as in the DOM API, tree nodes are treated as first-class values. We take advantage of this feature in order to implement an information flow control mechanism that is finer-grained than previous approaches in the literature. Furthermore, we extend Core DOM with additional constructs to model the behavior of live collections in the DOM Core Level 1 API. We show that this kind of construct effectively augments the observational power of an attacker and we modify the proposed monitor so as to tackle newly introduced forms of information leaks.